General William Roy, 1726-1790: Father of the Ordnance Survey 9781399505802

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General William Roy 1726–1790

General William Roy 1726–1790 Father of the Ordnance Survey

Humphrey Welfare

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Humphrey Welfare, 2022 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/14pt Sabon LT Pro by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 0578 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 0580 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 0581 9 (epub) The right of Humphrey Welfare to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Preface Prologue: A Dinner Party for Captain Cook

vii ix xii xv

1

Foundations: The Acquisition of Knowledge and Values Carluke: the background to a childhood  Off to school and out into the world In Edinburgh

1 1 6 11

2

The Map-maker: Developing ‘the Soldier’s Eye’ The need for a military map of the Highlands The specification of The Great Map In the field The surveyors and the draughtsmen The Lowlands, the coast, and the relevance of antiquities Products and results

22 22 27 32 42 47 52

3

The Military Engineer: Raids, Resources and Fortifications An Engineer in England and raids across the Channel In Germany The Quartermaster South-East England and Ireland A winter in Dunkirk Making plans: for a national map Supplies, logistics and advice Invasion fears and countermeasures

64 64 70 77 82 86 92 96 105

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4 The Antiquary in the Field: Empathy with the Army of Rome 115 The long walk and the forerunners: Gordon and Horsley 115 The beginning of field archaeology and Captain Melville’s quest124 The summer of 1755: Strathmore and the Antonine Wall 131 The revival of a dormant passion 142 The forger and his trap 149 The ‘Detached Pieces’ 151 A legacy bequeathed 153 5 The Practical and Sociable Scientist: Hypsometry and the Royal Society A Scot in London and an intellectual home Hypsometry: the search for a practical rule On Schiehallion Greenwich and other commitments Argyll Street

168 168 174 182 186 189

6

The Geodesist: Large Triangles and Minuscule Adjustments International collaboration On Hounslow Heath: an exercise in experimental physics Fortifications, feuds and first steps in Kent While waiting for Ramsden: a new family Linking Britain and France Last days, in Lisbon and London

202 202 210 220 226 230 238

7

Aftermath and Legacy: The Birth of the Ordnance Survey Operations resume Non-cartographic legacies A name for accuracy and utility

250 250 257 260

Appendix 1: Chronology Appendix 2: General Roy’s Instructions on Reconnoitring Appendix 3: Glossary List of Abbreviations Bibliographical References Index

270 274 278 280 281 296

Figures

1.1 The landscape of William’s childhood, as depicted in the Military Survey of Scotland 3 2.1 An extract from Clement Lempriere’s map A Description of the Highlands of Scotland 24 2.2 The Pass of Ballater, on Deeside, on the Fair Copy of the Military Survey of Scotland 29 2.3 The battlefield at Culloden, drawn by William, probably in 1747 34 2.4 A watercolour by Paul Sandby of the Military Survey in the field near Loch Rannoch 35 2.5 A circumferentor or ‘plain theodolite’ of the type that seems to have been used on the Military Survey 36 2.6 A watercolour, known as Portrait of a Draughtsman, attributed to Paul Sandby, and probably a portrait of William45 2.7 William’s survey of the coast of the Rhins of Galloway 49 2.8 William’s survey of the lower Esk from Canonbie to Gretna 53 2.9 A reduction of part of the Military Survey of Scotland, a quarter of the original scale, showing The King’s Road from Stirling into the Highlands 55 3.1 Part of William’s survey of the strategically important road from Guildford to Chichester 67 3.2 The port of Cherbourg and its defences, drawn by William from the deck of The Essex 71 3.3 A detail of William’s acclaimed plan of the Battle of Minden (Thonhausen), 1759 73 3.4 William’s map of the allied army’s movements in the expedition to Einbeck in November 1761 76

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A detail from the map accompanying William’s Military Description of south-east England, 1765 83 3.6 A view of Dunkirk, drawn by Pierre-Alexandre Royer and engraved by Claude Duflos, 1748 88 3.7 The headstone that William erected on the grave of his brother, James, at Prestonpans 98 3.8 Georgian castrametation; the army camp at Coxheath, laid out by William in 1748 107 4.1 The great promontory fort at Burghead, from The Military Antiquities117 4.2 Burnswark, from The Military Antiquities 119 4.3 Alexander Gordon’s highly stylised and ‘corrected’ plan of the Roman fort and the large camp at Dalginross 123 4.4 John Horsley’s published plan of Dalginross 124 4.5 William’s plan of the Roman fort at Castledykes 126 4.6 The Roman camps in Strathmore discovered by Robert Melville130 4.7 The complex defences of the second-century fort at Ardoch 134 4.8 Part of the Antonine Wall, surveyed in 1755 138 4.9 The west end of William’s survey of the Antonine Wall 140 4.10 The great hillfort of Maiden Castle, in Dorset 143 4.11 William’s survey of the Roman fort and camp at Dalginross 157 5.1 Jesse Ramsden’s portable barometers 178 5.2 The apparatus that William devised to investigate how much a column of mercury would expand between freezing and boiling 179 5.3 The topography of Schiehallion 184 5.4 The Argyll [Concert] Rooms in Little Argyle Street c. 1815 191 6.1 The western end of the baseline on Hounslow Heath 213 6.2 The stands made to carry the deal rods in the measurement of the base on Hounslow Heath 214 6.3 The map by Thomas Reynolds of the triangulation set out between Hounslow Heath and the French coast 225 6.4 Is this the face of William Roy? 229 6.5 Jesse Ramsden’s great theodolite, drawn by Thomas Reynolds234 7.1 The triangulation pillar on the site of William’s birthplace 263 7.2 The label marking the site of Miltonhead, on the Ordnance Survey One-inch to the Mile Seventh Series, Sheet 61 264 3.5

Acknowledgements

Despite appearances, no biographer works alone. During my research for this book I have asked for help from my family, from friends and from specialists, and from institutions of all sizes. Many of the debts that are due are for answers to specific requests; others are broader and of much longer standing. The research would have been impossible without my appointment as a Visiting Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. I am grateful to my colleagues there – Sam Turner, Rob Collins, Ian Haynes and Peter Stone – for their support. Nearly fifty years earlier, as a student in that university, my tutor, George Jobey, gave me the confidence to research widely and instilled a belief that (as in the motto of the Royal Society) there was no substitute for going back to the site and to the original sources. This was also the mantra in my first job, as an Archaeological Investigator in the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, where Kenneth Steer and Alastair MacLaren taught me a great deal about the use of language in the presentation of research; they would have been interested in this book and would have sought to make good my shortcomings. Through the good offices of Jonathan Betts, Gloria Clifton, Emeritus Curator of the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory, Greenwich, very generously explored the link between Colin MacLaurin and William by checking, on my behalf, the notes left in Greenwich by  E.  G. R. Taylor. Sophie Jackson and Robert Hartle of MOLA provided information about the excavations in the burial ground at  St  James’ Gardens, Camden, and I am also grateful to Graeme Smith, Solent University, for helping me along the way, and to Alan Montgomery for pointing me to a copy of William’s missing report to Watson in 1752.

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I am much indebted to Chris Fleet, Map Curator in the National Library of Scotland, for his enthusiastic support and advice, and for the supply of images from the Military Survey of Scotland. Stephen Lloyd, an authority on Richard and Maria Cosway, commented on the portrait of William, and Irene, Larry and Isabel Biricz of Toronto responded to enquiries about its provenance. Jean Barr and Christine Warren of the Carluke Parish Historical Society threw light on the Clifton Wright burglary in 1929. I have greatly benefited from the professional opinions of our medical children, Becky, Will, Lindsay and Pip, on William Roy’s chronic illness which overshadowed his later life. My brothers, Simon and Adam, provided regular encouragement and helped with genealogies, photographs and advice on the writing of biographies. Matthew Edney, Osher Professor of the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine, and a second, anonymous, reader offered very helpful reactions to my initial proposal to EUP. Yolande Hodson, the doyenne of these studies, kindly read and commented on Chapters 2 and 3; David Breeze did likewise on Chapter 4, and Rebekah Higgitt, Principal Curator of Science in National Museums Scotland, did so on Chapters 5 and 6. I am hugely grateful to them; they have tried to keep me right, but any mistakes that may remain are my own responsibility. The manuscript and published sources for William Roy’s life are well scattered, and I am grateful for the assistance that I have received from the staff at: The British Library, at St Pancras and Boston Spa; Christie’s archives; City of Westminster Archives; Cumbria Archives  Centre,  Whitehaven; Historic England Archive, Swindon;  The  London Metropolitan Archives; The National Archives, Kew; The National Library of Scotland; the archives of The National Portrait Gallery; The National Records of Scotland; The Natural History Museum library; The Postal Museum; The Royal Archives, Windsor; The Royal Astronomical Society; The Royal Society, library and archives; the archives of The Scottish National Portrait Gallery; the library and archives of The Society of Antiquaries of London; the library of The Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the library and archives of The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland; and the libraries of the Universities of Cambridge, Durham, Newcastle and York. I owe a special debt to the team at EUP, especially Ersev Ersoy, Emma House, Louise Hutton and Eddie Clark, for their encouragement and guidance, and for the alchemy of turning a bundle of digital files into



Acknowledgements xi

a book. I have been fortunate to benefit from the meticulous copyediting of Geraldine Lyons which has strengthened the text. And most of all to Nicky, for nodding kindly at my enthusiasms over so many years, and for patiently accepting some solitude while her husband was rummaging in the past.

Preface

One of the characteristics of the Enlightenment was the willingness to push beyond personal intellectual boundaries: to try to understand adjacent disciplines, to master them and take them forward. The autodidact could break through, enabling the individual to become eminent in an area of study. The word polymath appeared in the early seventeenth century to describe deep learning across several different subjects, endowing this unfamiliar ability with an air of admiration and perhaps a little bemusement also. This is not to claim that William Roy was a polymath, but he was someone who honestly engaged with the diverse areas of his ignorance that he regretted, and then went about addressing them so successfully that he could become a practitioner. He had several books in his library that were explicitly introductions to subjects, and their presence demonstrates his willingness to learn throughout his life. Now, in contrast, we live in an age of specialism; most of us have either lost that desire for broad and continual self-improvement, or we are wary of exercising it, so there are problems that have to be faced in the writing of a biography of a man like William: it is a cross-disciplinary subject, and this means that little knowledge can be assumed on the part of the reader who may come to it from one direction or another. At the same time, specialists may feel that their own sphere of interest has been under-represented, or not treated in sufficient detail, or it has been described only at a level that is simplistic so that readers from other specialisms may readily understand it. In trying to achieve some balance, tolerance of the needs of others may be required. Thus the references in the notes to each chapter often act as pointers to deeper or wider consideration of the relevant topic, especially for those who are tempted to explore beyond their own particular discipline. If readers wish to do this, in emulation of William’s own willingness to cross boundaries,



Preface xiii

it will be a fitting by-product. In addition, a short glossary has been included in Appendix 3 so that the terms that may be perfectly familiar to an archaeologist, say, may be explained to a geodesist, and vice versa. The structure of the book is broadly chronological, the central chapters being devoted to William Roy’s various preoccupations which, happily, were broadly successive: topographical cartography, antiquarian studies, science and geodesy. The exception to this structure is the chapter on his professional life as an Engineer which continued in parallel with his specialist projects. An account of William’s working life could have been written as a series of essays from specialist contributors, discretely focused on the context of the subjects of the chapters here, and on his relevant achievements in each field. That would have been a very different book. This is a biography, an attempt to draw out the narrative of his life, and to identify the continuous threads, connections and influences within it. In addition to charting his successes and failures, and trying to assess his character, the intention has been to set out how the various phases of his life, both accidentally and deliberately, followed some evolutionary logic towards national cartography in Britain. This is not a book about the Ordnance Survey, as such; it simply examines one man’s contribution to the principles and standards that would later underpin the organisation, part of his lasting legacy. In the absence of personal diaries – and he does not seem to have been mentioned in the diaries of anyone else – the opportunities to approach the psychology of an individual are constrained, although the few surviving letters and William’s published work provide some insights. It is possible, however, to come a little closer by looking at his social circle and the individuals with whom he associated most often. These form an important component in tracing the course of his career and in examining whose influence may have affected his intellectual life. More privately, the contents of William’s library provide a view into the breadth of his interests and his openness to the pursuit of what would now be termed continuous professional development; Mr Christie’s catalogue1 of the executors’ sale in 1790 offers many insights although it conceals, in its bundled lots, the minor items that may have been equally illuminating. From the work that he himself prepared for publication, especially The Military Antiquities, William gave to the King the best versions of his original illustrations; in selecting images for this book I have followed his preference in this wherever possible. Many of the primary records from the early years of the Ordnance Survey, and its antecedents, were destroyed in the bombing of Southampton on 30 November 1940. It is likely that a considerable

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amount of material relating to William Roy was lost that night, although Sir Charles Close had earlier published some extracts from a small number of William’s letters.2 The surviving archival material is widely dispersed, the principal sources being The National Archives, at Kew, The National Records of Scotland, and the archives of the Royal Society. For cartography, the main repositories are the King’s Topographical Collections in the British Library and The Royal Collections Trust (Hodson 2020); for The Military Antiquities, the British Library and the Society of Antiquaries of London. Particular mention must be made of the exceptionally useful map images provided online by The National Library of Scotland: a truly remarkable resource. Quotations from the contemporary press have been extracted from The British Newspaper Archive (britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) and from the Burney Collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers in the British Library (bl.uk/collection-guides/burney-collection). The secondary sources and commentaries vary considerably in their coverage. The Military Survey of Scotland has received the greatest attention, whereas William’s subsequent work as an Engineer has been largely ignored. His archaeological studies have not been re-examined to any significant extent since Sir George Macdonald’s exhaustive treatment in 1917, and the geodetic projects have enjoyed more limelight than the experiments in hypsometry. Overall, few commentators have made cross-references from one topic to another. Authoritative encyclopaedic entries for many of the subjects covered in this book are included in The History of Cartography.3 The closure of archives and libraries in 2020–21, during the pandemic, meant that some questions were not followed up but, more positively, it ensured that the collection of material had to stop, and writing had to begin. William always signed himself ‘Will Roy’, although whether this was a formal contraction or the name by which he was known to his family is less clear. Here, his full Christian name has been used throughout. NOTES 1. Christie 1790. 2. Close 1969, xiii–xiv and 6–10. 3. Edney and Pedley 2019.

Prologue: A Dinner Party for Captain Cook

On 6 September 1775, the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, hosted a dinner party at Greenwich1 for Captain James Cook, the supreme navigator, who, five weeks earlier, had returned from his second voyage into the Pacific, in the Resolution. The other guests were all Fellows of the Royal Society: Sir John Pringle, physician to George III, and the Society’s President; Daniel Solander, the botanist and favourite pupil of Linnaeus, who had been Joseph Banks’s collaborator on Cook’s Endeavour voyage in 1768–71; and James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, painter, architect and Surveyor of Greenwich Hospital. The final seat round the table was occupied by Lieutenant Colonel William Roy. He had grown up in rural Clydesdale and had, like Cook, through his natural ability and determination, moved into the highest echelons of scientific society. This book seeks to tell the story of how he came to be included in the party at Greenwich, and how he gradually put in place the foundations for his vision of a national cartographic survey, the great project of his life. NOTE 1. Duyker and Tingbrand 1995, 359–60.

1 Foundations: The Acquisition of Knowledge and Values

CARLUKE: THE BACKGROUND TO A CHILDHOOD

T

he Clyde, the great river of western and central Scotland, rises on the eastern flanks of the Lowther Hills, deep in the Southern Uplands, and flows north-westwards, past the county town of Lanark and through the great city of Glasgow, slowly broadening to form the Firth of Clyde. In the parish of Carluke, about six miles downstream from Lanark, the valley is broad and open, but within half a mile of the river the land drops sharply down to a narrow floodplain. On the broad shoulder above the eastern bank stood a small house called Miltonhead. It was there, on 4 May 1726, that William Roy was born.1 From his home the horizon to the south-east was dominated by the swelling dome of Tinto, less than fourteen miles away; formed of igneous rock, this is the highest summit in Clydesdale, the elevation of which William would later measure during experiments on barometric pressure.2 However, it is the view to the north-west of the house that must have excited his imagination and curiosity: there the distant backdrop is formed by Ben Lomond and the ‘Arrochar Alps’, mountains on the southern edge of the Highlands that rise to more than 1,000 m above Loch Lomond and the  sea-lochs of southern Argyll. Snow-capped in winter and catching the sunlight in summer, that was a world altogether different from the landscape around him, and one that invited exploration and discovery. A need to understand his surroundings, and the relationship between one place and another, would dominate his life. Carluke had been dignified with the status of a Burgh of Barony in 1662.3 In the eighteenth century the village had a prosperous rural setting in which ‘… the numerous orchards, natural woods, and modern inclosures … afford a pleasant prospect of cultivation’. There were tall

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trees in the hedgerows around the limestone pastures, but much of the land was under the plough. This was – and is – fruit-growing country: the Statistical Account of Scotland of 1793 listed about fifty varieties of apples that were grown in those numerous orchards, and more than thirty types of pear.4 Even with these natural advantages, good husbandry demanded careful management, and land management was the Roy family’s speciality. The fortunes of the family were closely tied to the prosperity of the small but long-established estates that lay between Carluke and the Clyde: Hallcraig, Milton and Kirkton (Figure 1.1). William’s grandfather, John Roy, who died in 1728, had been recorded in the poll-tax return for 1695 as a ‘servitor to my Lord Hallcraig’,5 although his precise role in the household is not made clear. His employer was Sir John Hamilton, an MP who had been appointed a Lord of Session in 1689. In 1697 Sir John was a commissioner for the trial of twenty-four men and women in Renfrewshire who were accused of witchcraft, seven of whom were convicted and burnt at the stake. Although this tragic endorsement of superstition took place a generation before William Roy was born, it illustrates graphically the changes that Scotland was to undergo in the following century, and is in sharp contrast to the life that William would lead as a scientist in London. The Scottish Enlightenment burned all the brighter because of what had gone before. At least a couple of years earlier than that infamous trial, Sir John had acquired the lands of Milton, down on the east bank of the Clyde; after his death in 1706 the combined estate passed through the hands of his daughter, Isabella, to her husband, Sir William Gordon of Dalfolly. In about 1742 he was succeeded by their son, Charles Hamilton Gordon. John Roy’s son, also named John, was William’s father. He was born in 1697, and he probably followed his own father when he became gardener and land steward (or factor) to Sir William. His brother, James Roy, seems to have played the same role for the Lockharts of Lee (Figure  4.5), three miles up the valley, close to Lanark.6 John’s wideranging tasks as the factor for the newly combined estate of Hallcraig and Milton may be summarised by the contents of a contemporary book by Edward Laurence.7 Among other things, John would have been responsible for: advice on the purchase and use of land; the financial accounts, estimating and the costing of new developments; the maintenance of tenanted properties and keeping the roads in good repair; the choice of stock and the supervision of tenancies, fencing, draining and manuring; managing woods and parklands; and for the control of moles, rabbits and poachers. Only eight pages out of 212 in this book

Figure 1.1  The landscape of William’s childhood, as depicted in the Military Survey of Scotland. The policies of Milton are beside the Clyde, with Miltonhead out in the fields to the east. Hallcraig and Kirkton are shown with, to the south of the latter, Overshielhills, the family’s later home. © The British Library Board, K.Top.48.25-1, a–f

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were devoted to the very necessary art of land survey, in which Laurence strongly advocated the use of a theodolite and scorned the quality of surveys made with the much simpler standard instrument, the plane table. Surveying was a skill that was central to the work of the land steward, but it was one that only had to be deployed very occasionally. As a boy, William would have been more likely to have been familiar with crops and timber than with angles and stations. In July 1722, John married Mary Stewart.8 The wedding was in Carluke but there is no indication as to where Mary came from.9 In May 1723, Mary gave birth to her eldest child, a daughter, who was christened Grizel.10 William arrived three years later, and two other children were to complete the family: Susannah (or Susan), born in 1728, and James in 1730.11 William was baptised in the medieval church of Carluke on 12 May.12 The names of the two witnesses,13 Captain Walter Lockhart and Mr Gavin Muir, shed some light on the regard in which John Roy was already held, and on the context for the upbringing which was to mould and determine William’s character and principles. Of the two, Gavin Muir was the less surprising. Like Walter Lockhart, he was a staunch Presbyterian14 but his landholding at Greenbanks, to the south-east of Carluke, near Kilcadzow, was only valued at £60, compared to £300 for Walter Lockhart at Kirkton.15 More importantly, Muir was the factor for the Maudslie estate,16 immediately downstream from Milton, so he was John Roy’s professional neighbour. In contrast, Walter Lockhart, born in about 1656, was an old man who had led an eventful life. The inhabitant with the highest status within the little burgh of Carluke, he lived at Kirkton, a substantial early seventeenth-century building to the south-west of the village. In his youth, in 1679, he had played a significant part on the Covenanting side in the rout of the government forces at Drumclog and in the defeat of the rebels by the Duke of Monmouth at Bothwell Bridge. His resistance was a product of his upbringing. Carluke had been ‘one of the most zealous strongholds of the Presbyterian party’ and the parishioners had shown ‘considerable hostility to the Episcopal form of church government revived at the Restoration’ of 1660.17 In 1683 Walter Lockhart was sent to prison for his part in the uprising but he was bailed for 4,000 merks (Scots) to stay in Edinburgh. However, becoming alarmed by the severity of the sentences meted out to others who had been involved, he fled abroad, just before he was arraigned on a charge of high treason. He was not to stay out of the country for long. On the arrival of William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the re-establishment



Foundations 5

of a Protestant ascendency, Walter went straight to England to serve the new king and to demonstrate his loyalty. Returning to Scotland, he raised and funded a troop of dragoons, at ruinous expense; unabashed, he later successfully petitioned the King for the losses and expenses that he had incurred.18 Once peace had returned, he resumed the running of his estate. Twice married, Lockhart died in Edinburgh Castle in 1743 when he was still Paymaster of the Forces in Scotland. In Carluke he had been a regular attender at the meetings of the heritors (landowners) from 1703 to 1739, and it was this that would have brought him into regular contact with John Roy. Even as a young man, John was gaining respect; he evidently worked hard, and his skills were useful to the community as well as to his employer. He was clearly happy to share his expertise and so, inevitably, the demands on him were many and various. For example, the heritors, who paid for the upkeep of the schools, the manse and the graveyards in the parish, asked him to sell the kirk clock and case in 1742, to estimate the cost of the repairs to the bridge near the manse in 1746, and to sell some trees from the minister’s yard in 1747.19 These tasks would have been practical extensions of his employment, but there were also frequent opportunities for what would now be called voluntary work. In July 1737, at the age of forty and shortly after William’s eleventh birthday, John had been ordained as an elder of the kirk.20 The Kirk Session, of which he now became a member, was responsible for all manner of practical things including the digging of graves, ensuring that coffins were provided for the poor, and for adjudicating in cases of bastardy. The records of the Kirk Session are dominated by lists of donations to the poor of the parish, and by the actions taken to ensure the morality of the congregation, especially in cases of sexual misconduct. For ‘antenuptial fornication’, couples would be rebuked, exhorted to repentance and ordered to appear before the congregation. Others were taken to task, for instance, for the ‘profanation of the Sabbath by leading a cow from home on the Sabbath Day towards Skirling where the fair was to be held the Monday thereafter’.21 There was to be no backsliding from strict adherence to the high standards demanded for a Christian life. From the first, John Roy was given positions of responsibility. In November 1737 the Kirk Session appointed him to be the elder that would represent them in the Presbytery of Lanark, and this task was repeatedly assigned to him until just before his death in December 1748. He was given a wide variety of other jobs to do. Thus, when it was necessary to buy a new mortcloth – material to drape over a coffin, for

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the hire of which fees was paid – John and the minister were ordered to go to Glasgow to buy velvet and lining. (Never being prone to unnecessary expenditure, the Kirk Session deemed that the fringe of the existing mortcloth could be reused.)22 The minister was Andrew Orr who, even though there had been some violent opposition to his appointment in 1732, was nevertheless in post until his death thirty years later. Over the decades of his incumbency Carluke became a settled congregation: in this Presbyterian world the Kirk Session had clear views about what was right, and never shied away from acting according to its conscience. This certainty of purpose, led by Andrew, evidently dictated the response to the threat posed by the Jacobites, who were equated with the power of the Roman Catholic Church. The Jacobite issue, a simmering civil war, had received additional impetus as a reaction to the Act of Union between Scotland and England in 1707, and it over-boiled in the short-lived risings in 1715 and 1719. Although Clydesdale had not been directly affected, the tension was always there in the background, and feelings could be stoked up every Sunday when the sermon – the centrepiece of the Presbyterian act of worship – was an opportunity to provide a spur to consciousness and a draught across the embers of any slumbering commitment. In Carluke, Andrew Orr recruited a band of ‘fencibles’ when Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, landed in Scotland in 1745. To meet this threat, weapons were stored in the choir of the kirk, and drill took place on the north side of the churchyard. Fast days were declared in September and December 1745 ‘on account of the present troubles’. In March 1746 the Kirk Session agreed a payment of £1 14s to John Buchanon, a soldier who had been disabled in the rout of the government’s forces by the Jacobite army at Prestonpans the previous September, and on 26 June there was a ‘General thanksgiving … on account of the entire defeat of the Rebels at Culloden on April 16th last’.23 Although the Roy family was at the heart of the kirk’s congregation this should not be taken as a suggestion that they were fiery radicals; instead, to judge from William’s later life, their views were probably characterised by solid support for the King and for a peaceable, established order. This they would express not in political rhetoric but in the intelligent and diligent application of their considerable skills. OFF TO SCHOOL AND OUT INTO THE WORLD

Those skills were nurtured by education, formal and informal. Although the heritors paid for the upkeep of the schools, it was the elders of the



Foundations 7

kirk who were responsible for the day-to-day running of the schools and for the oversight of education in the parish. The opportunity to learn was important in Scottish society; by the late seventeenth century almost all parishes in the Lowlands had some form of school, and when William went to study under John Russell, at a building in Kirkstyle Muir in Carluke, the approaches taken would have entirely familiar to him. (Russell had been ordained an elder of the kirk of Carluke at the same time as William’s father.24) This new experience will have reinforced the foundations that had been provided by his family, in which a great deal of emphasis was placed on the value of education, on hard work, morality, public service and loyalty to the King. These were powerful influences that were to play out through the whole course of William’s life. Compared with his time at the small parish school in Carluke, entry to Lanark Grammar School, five miles away, must have seemed quite daunting to William, for this was a venerable and successful institution, founded in 1183 and occupying a fifteenth-century building in Broomgate.25 At this time there was some widespread pressure in Scotland for the curriculum in schools to be extended beyond the mandatory reading, writing, Latin and Bible study. The more progressive elements of society thought that if Scotland’s needs as a nation were to be well served, those with talent should also become proficient in applied mathematics, geography and languages. However, change was slow. Although Greek had been added, mathematics was not on the curriculum at Lanark when William was there; it was not to be offered until 1746, long after he had left.26 Standards at the school were evidently high, as the careers of some of William’s older peers demonstrate. These included Gavin Hamilton, born three years before William in 1723, who became an antiquary, an art dealer and a very successful painter of portraits and of Greek and Roman literary scenes; he excavated (after a fashion) at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, and acquired Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, bringing it to London for sale.27 Hamilton’s career in Italy illustrates the good grounding in the Classics that the boys in Lanark received. Robert McQueen, born the year before Hamilton in 1722, would become a Judge of the Court of Session and Lord Justice Clerk: Lord Braxfield. Some of the stories and quotations that abound about his brilliant life on the bench may have been embroidered or wrongly attributed to him, but he was memorable for his blunt and colourful language. Braxfield would, at times, pronounce his decisions in broad Scots – underlining a perception  that his judgments might often be something of a

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theatrical performance – but he clearly wrote good standard English.28 Nevertheless, Scots was the language of the playground, providing a vocabulary that may have been useful to William when he was surveying in the Lowlands in the early 1750s. This duality of speech, combined with large helpings of Greek and Latin, probably nurtured the facility for languages that William later demonstrated. There is no record of how John and Mary afforded the extra expense that must have been incurred in sending William to Lanark, but for his brother James, four years younger, there was to be some generous assistance. In 1737, the Countess of Forfar, who was a Lockhart of Lee by descent, founded the Forfar bursaries: these supported five boys from the Lanark area for up to thirteen years of education. For those who stayed the course, this would take four of them from the grammar school to Glasgow University, at the age of fourteen or fifteen; two might then qualify for further study, and one might survive to do two final years in Medicine or Theology. James was especially fortunate; even though the terms of the bursary set out that the boy chosen ‘… should be one born within the lands belonging to the Laird of Lee, yet for special reasons [unspecified] she [the Countess of Forfar] dispensed with that clause in this instance and … it would be agreeable to her Ladyship that James Roy, son to John Roy, Gardener in Milton, be presented from this parish’. His luck did not stop there: all of his peers from other parishes fell by the wayside and he had the whole income (probably £270 Scots) for ten years.29 He was clearly a brilliant pupil. William may well have been amply on a par, but he could not have been selected for a Forfar bursary as the entrants had to be over eight and under ten. In 1737, when the scheme was founded, he was already eleven. In these circumstances, whatever his talents, any thought of going to the university would have been out of the question. William probably left the Grammar School in Lanark no later than the summer of 1740 or 1741, at the age that some of his peers would have left for the university. Going out into the world, he was armed only with a little knowledge of his father’s line of work, a Classical education, little or no mathematics, and some acquired values. Yet six or seven years afterwards he was asked to undertake the mapping of the Highlands, an ambitious task that was not at all straightforward and that was potentially fraught with political sensitivity. The records are almost entirely silent (or are unhelpful) about how these years were spent, and the great conundrum has been how he managed to make the transition from the bright school leaver to the independent and self-reliant military cartographer.



Foundations 9

A natural impulse would have been to follow his father into land management, although his education may have given him other ideas, and there may have been an additional factor too. In the years from 1738  to  1741 the harvests in Scotland were exceptionally poor, with  consequential high prices for grain and for cattle. In 1740, the coldest year and winter on record, there were food riots in Midlothian and elsewhere.30 Despite his background, it may not have seemed an altogether auspicious moment for William to embark on a career on a single estate; the city, and regular employment that made more direct use of his education in Lanark, may have been more attractive options. William recorded nothing about the six years of his life between leaving school and beginning work on the Military Survey of Scotland in 1747, and the references made by others to this formative period of training and experience are extremely sparse and equivocal. There is almost no firm ground, but considerable scope for speculation. Writing twenty years after William’s death, George Chalmers (not a wholly reliable historian) casually remarked that, before William’s appointment to the Survey, he had been working in the Post Office in Edinburgh.31 This undocumented claim subsequently prompted the suggestion that he had been employed to survey the post roads.32 On the face of it, this would have made some sense: in the 1740s the condition of the roads was poor, and the postal network was still very limited, but it would have been important to check the distances between towns as these were a basis for postal charges. The Post Office in Scotland at that time was still a very small organisation, having less than a dozen members of staff;33 William’s name is not listed in the earliest surviving Establishment Book of 1742, although it is still possible that he was employed in the Post Office for two or three years thereafter.34 If he had indeed been engaged in measuring the roads this would have been ideal preparation for the next stage of his career, so much of which was concerned with surveying the country using road-traverses.35 It seems that William had had some limited experience as an estate surveyor before he ever went to Edinburgh, although proof is lacking. In his memoirs, Sir James Campbell of Craigforth (just to the north-west of Stirling) wrote that: While I was yet at my father’s house at Craigforth, a year or two before my departure for Germany, I met there with Mr Roy, a respectable land surveyor, who had been professionally employed by my father in taking a plan of one or two of his fields in the neighbourhood of Stirling. He had afterwards adopted the military profession, but it so chanced that I never heard

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of him until we met and recognised each other at the battle of Minden. He afterwards procured a subaltern’s Commission in the 51st.36

Campbell was maddeningly vague about his timescales but from internal evidence elsewhere within his book it seems that he met William in about 1757 (when Campbell was about twelve years old) and that the survey of the fields was undertaken some years earlier, before William had joined the army. (This he formally did in 1755, but he had had a military attachment from 1747.) The survey drawings have not been traced, and they may have been destroyed when Craigforth was gutted by fire in 1930, so William’s work there is undated. It might well have been a useful sideline from his duties on the Military Survey, but the slim possibility remains that William was surveying small areas at large scales on his own account before he was appointed to the task of surveying the Highlands in 1747. However, if this had occupied any significant time it might be expected that some examples might have survived and would have been identified. None has.37 In 1747, when Lieutenant Colonel David Watson of the Corps of Engineers, Deputy Adjutant General to General Ligonier, and Deputy Quartermaster General,38 was casting about for someone to take on his scheme for the mapping of the Highlands, he must have been seeking (consciously or unconsciously) some personal facets in his ideal candidate: that person needed to be an utterly reliable, self-reliant character who had artistic ability and some surveying expertise – including a facility with the comparatively straightforward mathematics associated with the very extensive small-scale sketch-mapping that was envisaged. In the loose system of patronage that prevailed in the eighteenth century, a personal recommendation would have been all-important, and there was an indirect link between William and Lieutenant Colonel Watson that may have played a part in providing this, if the cards fell right. The link was provided by the Dundas family, of Arniston in Midlothian, which exercised immense power and influence in Scotland from the 1740s to the end of the eighteenth century.39 Robert Dundas (1685–1753), the second Lord Arniston, was a lawyer who became, successively, Solicitor General of Scotland, Lord Advocate and finally the Lord President of the Court of Session. In 1712 he married Elizabeth Watson (a daughter of Robert and Mary Watson of Muirhouse, and  thus  David Watson’s eldest sister). Their son Robert (‘Robie’: 1713–87) followed his father’s career path; he became a close friend of his uncle David and was to play a part in William’s future. In 1734, after Elizabeth’s death, the elder Robert Dundas married again: his new



Foundations 11

bride was Ann Gordon, the daughter of Sir William Gordon of Hallcraig and Milton, in Carluke. Robie was now twenty-one and he got on very well with his new stepmother. Seven years later, in 1741, Robie and his wife moved to their estate at Bonnington, beside the Falls of Clyde, six miles up the river from Milton (Figure 4.5). Taken together, these circumstances provided ample opportunity for David Watson to hear of the bright young son of the factor, then aged fifteen. There is no evidence that they actually met at this stage, but at the very least Watson would have known something of William’s background, and this would have counted for much in furnishing that personal recommendation as to character and competence that would have provided confidence in any appointment. IN EDINBURGH

William had left Lanark Grammar School with little mathematical knowledge, so how did he cope with the specific expertise required for surveying, a career which led, in the nineteenth century, to him being credited in textbooks for work on spheroidal trigonometry? Like some of his contemporaries, such as James Cook in navigation and Charles Hutton in mathematics, William was certainly something of an autodidact. Scattered amongst the highly academic books that he had in his library in later life, there were some which were clearly introductions to a subject: examples include various periods of history, architecture, commerce, perspective and navigation. Although these choices may partly have been because he was interested in training and in specialist education, nevertheless it seems that he was not ashamed to confront any area of his own ignorance and to apply himself to learn, taking his knowledge from scratch to sound proficiency. But was this true of mathematics? Did he simply teach himself? An intriguing alternative has been suggested. In 1966, at the very end of her life, Professor Eva Taylor published her pioneering and encyclopaedic Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England. This is a biographical and bibliographical work of reference, and although a number of ends were left untied, the depth and breadth of her research is astonishing.40 In a brief discussion of the life of the instrument-maker James Short (later to be one of William’s friends in London), Taylor wrote that Short ‘… was one of a number of young Scotsman, William Roy and James Ferguson also among them, whose early mathematical abilities had been encouraged by Professor Colin MacLaurin of Edinburgh’. She cited no reference for this, and no further illumination has been found among her papers.41 Her focus

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was on England, so she did not include MacLaurin who spent all of his career in Scotland. Yet the idea that William first encountered higher mathematics under Colin MacLaurin, or from his immediate circle in Edinburgh, is eminently plausible. It also provides an introduction to the intellectual world that William was to join. Colin MacLaurin stands in the first rank of British mathematicians. Born in 1698, within an extended family of ministers serving in southern Argyll, he was orphaned at the age of nine and was brought up by his uncle Daniel. MacLaurin’s fascination with mathematics was kindled at the University of Glasgow when, aged twelve, he found a friend’s copy of Euclid’s Elements. He soon began to write papers following the principles of Isaac Newton who, in the 1660s, had devised and expounded the fundamental theorem of the calculus, the mathematics of variability and change. MacLaurin was to become a champion of Newton’s methods and approaches, embracing the principle that the universe is governed by rational and understandable laws.42 In 1713, at the age of fifteen, MacLaurin graduated with an MA from the university, but he turned away from a career in the church and pursued his mathematical studies. His dissertation had supported Newton’s views on gravity and planetary motion, although those things that were still inexplicable were simply attributed (by both Newton and MacLaurin) to God’s will.43 His uncle Daniel sent his dissertation to the mathematician and astronomer Colin Campbell of Achnaba,44 who was almost certainly a correspondent of Newton. The dissertation sparked off a lengthy correspondence between the old man and the recent graduate, and the exchange of several mathematical papers. Thus emboldened, in 1717 MacLaurin used his dissertation in support of his successful application to be appointed to the Chair of Mathematics at Marischal College in the University of Aberdeen. He was nineteen. In the next two years he published two papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on the construction, measurement and description of curves, and he was elected as a Fellow of the Society in 1719. Strongly encouraged by Newton, the President of the Royal Society, MacLaurin published more of his work on curves in his book, Geometria Organica, which he dedicated to Newton. Although there would be no check to MacLaurin’s rate of research there was now, however, to be a hiatus in his prodigal career. While still employed in Aberdeen, he was asked by Lord Polwarth to be a tutor to his son; without receiving any permission to be absent from his post, in 1722 MacLaurin left with his charge for a very lengthy tour of France. After more than two years away his unfortunate pupil fell ill and died in



Foundations 13

Montpellier, so MacLaurin went back to his job in Marischal College. Not surprisingly, his relations with his employer never recovered, so he was fortunate that in 1725 Newton recommended him for the Chair of Mathematics in Edinburgh, to join the aged and frail James Gregory whose classes he took over.45 The long-suffering governors of Marischal College only learnt ‘by the Public Newsprints’ that MacLaurin had been appointed, a couple of months beforehand, to the Chair in Edinburgh. Aberdeen may well have been relieved by his eventual departure. Despite these ructions, MacLaurin applied himself energetically to the job in hand, with a punishing work programme. In 1741 The Scots Magazine recorded that he taught three classes during the same session, and sometimes a fourth. In the first, he begins with demonstrating the grounds of Vulgar and Decimal Arithmetic: Then proceeds to Euclid; and, after explaining the first six books, with the Plane Trigonometry and use of the tables of Logarithms, Sines, etc., he insists on Surveying, Fortification, and other practical parts, and concludes with the elements of Algebra. He gives Geographical lectures, once in the fortnight, to this class of students. In the second college [i.e. class] he repeats the Algebra again from its principles, and advanced farther in it; then proceeds to the theory and mensuration of Solids, Spherical Trigonometry, the doctrine of the Sphere, Dialling [i.e. solar time], and other practical parts. After this he gives the doctrine of the Conic Sections, with the theory of Gunnery; and concludes this college with the elements of Astronomy and Optics. He begins the third college with Perspective; then treats more fully of the Astronomy and Optics. Afterwards he prelects on Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia and explains the direct and inverse method of Fluxions. At a separate hour he begins a college of Experimental Philosophy, about the middle of December, which continues thrice every week till the beginning of April; and at proper hours of the night describes the constellations and shows the planets by telescopes of various kinds.46

MacLaurin was certainly busy, although he did find time to be one of the founders of the Philosophical Society (later The Royal Society of Edinburgh) and to be sought after in society. [His] mathematical classes soon became very numerous, there being generally upwards of a hundred young gentleman attending his lectures every year: who being of different standings and proficiency, he was obliged to divide them into four or five classes, in each of which he employed a full hour every day, from the 1st of November to the 1st of June.47

As with that of other members of the university staff, MacLaurin’s teaching was not restricted to those who had formally registered for a degree. Thus, for instance, in 1741 Robie Dundas paid two guineas to

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attend a course of lectures given by MacLaurin on astronomy, and this was not unusual as science, mathematics and philosophy were seen as the keys to the nation’s improvement.48 It is possible that William Roy was also able to be part of these wider audiences. He would not have been daunted by the intellectual challenge presented by the university – that, after all, was what his brother was destined for, and he could emulate that. Further, MacLaurin was a popular speaker on a popular subject and was influential in positioning mathematics as an essential element in general culture. Alexander Carlyle, later to be the minister at Inveresk and the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, recalled that Mr McLaurin was at this time a favourite professor, and no wonder, as he was the clearest and most agreeable lecturer on that abstract science that I ever heard. He made mathematics a fashionable study, which was felt afterwards in the war [of the Austrian Succession] that followed in 1743, when nine-tenths of the Engineers of the army were Scottish officers. The Academy at Woolwich was not then established.49

The breadth of the curriculum that MacLaurin insisted upon took in not just pure mathematics but also its applications, including surveying, fortification and gunnery: exactly the subjects that William was to need to underpin his future career. This wider focus on the practical use of mathematics, stressed by Carlyle, would have been strengthened by MacLaurin’s long-standing friendships with Engineers such as Dougal Campbell.50 Like the Engineers, MacLaurin had an interest in using mathematics to improve the standards of surveying and cartography. At a global, geodetic level, the very shape of the earth was a controversial topic in the 1730s and early 1740s, and at some point MacLaurin had made the necessary observations to set down a meridian line in Edinburgh, presumably (following Newton) to investigate gravity and the nature of the Earth’s spheroid, but also as an essential factor in astronomical work.51 At a more immediate level, in 1739 the Earl of Morton, later to be President of the Royal Society, had asked for MacLaurin’s assistance in surveying the coasts of Orkney and Shetland, where he held estates, ‘… and to take the measure of a degree of the meridian’. MacLaurin was too busy to go, but he drew up a specification and recommended his pupil and associate, the young instrument-maker James Short, for the work. Short’s report convinced MacLaurin of the ‘erroneous geography’ of Scotland: and therefore he employed several of his scholars, who were then settled in the northern counties, to survey the coasts. [These included Alexander Bryce



Foundations 15 and Murdoch Mackenzie, both recent graduates, who made high quality maps of Caithness, Orkney, Lewis, and of the coasts of Ireland and western Britain.] It was from observations like these, made by skilful persons, and with the best instruments, that Mr MacLaurin expected to see a good map of Scotland; not from the slavish copying of map-sellers, nor from a painful collecting and patching together of old draughts and surveys of little authority which he thought must contribute more to perpetuate then to rectify errors.52

This is a significant observation, for MacLaurin was advocating that a national map of Scotland – and the benefits that would accrue – could only be achieved through a completely new and properly specified survey. It is ironic that this was to come about as a consequence of an act of rebellion. When Prince Charles Edward Stewart raised his standard at Glenfinnan on 19 August 1745, William Roy was nineteen and had probably been living in Edinburgh for some time. If so, he now faced the exciting but terrifying prospect of being in a city under siege. Coming from Carluke there is little doubt that he would have opposed the advance of the Jacobites, but, if so, he was not necessarily in the majority within the city. The Lord Provost had been warned, some weeks beforehand, that the Prince was planning to land, but had taken no action. In contrast, MacLaurin, the professor of mathematics, who had been lecturing for years on the science of fortification, was very conscious of the city’s vulnerability and he now took a leading role in preparing the city against an attack. There was much to be done. Although the medieval town walls53 were still in place, taking in Heriot’s Hospital and extending eastwards to the Netherbow on the High Street, they had received attention only sporadically and were increasingly seen as a hindrance to trade. Beyond the walls, the urban area of the Old Town reached down the Canongate to Holyrood, and there were extensions westwards outside the West Port and southwards along Potter Row. Although relatively small in area, the city was densely built up and probably had a population of about 50,000. The first reaction of the Lord Provost, Archibald Stewart, was to ridicule the proposals for the defence of Edinburgh, and he spent the next fortnight repeatedly delaying or hindering the preparations. By 29 August the rebel army had reached Dalwhinnie, and by 3 September the Jacobites were in Dunkeld and Perth; unchecked, and gradually growing in strength, they would soon be at the gates of the capital. On 6 September, after a site inspection, Stewart asked MacLaurin for a plan of the city wall so that the weak points could be readily identified and

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addressed; this may have been a delaying tactic but MacLaurin delivered it the very next day.54 He was in a fever of activity: he made plans of the walls, proposed the several trenches, barricades, batteries, and such other defences as he thought could be got ready before the arrival of the rebels, and by which he hoped the town might be kept till the King’s forces should come to its relief. The whole burden, not only of contriving, but also of overseeing the execution, of these hasty fortifications fell to Mr MacLaurin’s share; he was employed night and day, in making plans, and running from place to place.55

The professor of mathematics had become the military Engineer. But still the work progressed agonisingly slowly, and it was not complete before the decision to surrender the city was taken by the authorities on 16 September. Exhausted, MacLaurin fled south to York. In Edinburgh, the castle had held out, initiating some days of sniping and cannon fire down the streets. For those opposed to the Prince (including William, if indeed he was there), life in the city must have been difficult, to say the least. The Prince waited several weeks for news of reinforcements before moving south, but this meant that the countryside around about was ravaged to feed the impatient Highlanders. This did nothing to endear them to the residents. Finally, on 31 October, the Jacobites began to leave Edinburgh, and they had gone by 4 November, marching through Carlisle into England. Ten days later, part of the King’s army, under Lieutenant General Handasyd, re-entered the city of Edinburgh unopposed. Colin MacLaurin returned home two days afterwards, but a fall from his horse on his way to York, and some storms on his return journey, had severely affected his health. His teaching commitments were taken on by one of his pupils, Alexander Bryce, but MacLaurin did not recover and he died on 14 June 1746, two months after the final defeat of the rebels at Culloden. His death left his widow financially insecure, but a subscription was raised – ‘for the author’s children’ – to publish his Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries, the final parts of which he had been dictating just before he died. The subscription list printed in the first edition of the Account in 1748 is astonishing. More than 1,000 names are listed: academics, aristocrats, businessmen, clergy, lawyers, politicians and soldiers. A number of them were (or very soon would be) part of William’s life: Sir James Campbell of Ardkinglas, Alexander Bryce, Robie Dundas, John Lockhart of Lee, The Earl of Morton, George Mark, Lord George Sackville, James Short, and – t­ ellingly – Lieutenant Colonel David Watson.



Foundations 17

This brings us full circle in considering how it was that David Watson came to ask William to work on the Military Survey of Scotland. As so often, it was probably a combination of circumstances, and happenstance, that made William a good choice. Watson’s links to the Gordons of Hallcraig and Milton may have led to a direct recommendation of William’s experience of land surveying, of his promising academic record in Lanark, his evident artistic talent, and his hard-working and dependable character. Politically, it seems certain that William would have been on the side of the King, something that would be crucial in the aftermath of Culloden. If he had indeed been working on road surveys for the Post Office, this would also have appealed to Watson. All of these factors would have engendered the confidence that was essential if Watson was to entrust his scheme to so young a man. In 1747 Watson was certainly in Edinburgh, planning alterations to the powder magazine in the castle,56 and if he too was within MacLaurin’s  circle, as the subscribers’ list suggests, then he may have asked the professor whether he knew of any suitable candidates, in the same way that Morton had asked MacLaurin to recommend his students for the surveys in the far north. William is likely to have been in the city for some time, as Chalmers suggested, but it is not known whether any link between William and MacLaurin was direct – through his attendance at some of the professor’s classes – or indirect, through the combined influence of mutual friends and acquaintances such as Alexander Bryce, Dougal Campbell, David Watson or James Short.57 It is striking, however, that the diverse interests that William pursued in later life, and his dedication to accurate science and sustained hard work, mirrored so closely those of the professor of mathematics; directly or indirectly, the influence was there. Whether or not MacLaurin recommended him, the invitation that William received from David Watson would determine the course of his life and career.

NOTES   1. OPR Births 629/00 0010 0058 Carluke. The buildings that William knew in his childhood have gone. His home, the house called Miltonhead, was still depicted in 1816 on William Forrest’s map of The County of Lanark from Actual Survey (Moir 1983, 201), standing alongside the lane that now leads north-westwards to Gillbank. The family had evidently left by 1744 when James Gilkerson was recorded living there. In 1855 the house was described as ‘… long … cleared away’ (NRS Carluke Kirk Session

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CH2/56/3/418; Rankin 1855, 148). The next home for the Roys in Carluke was at ‘Overshielhills’, later Upper Shieldhill; some parts of this farm and steading survive in Violet Gardens, off Shieldhill Road, surrounded by modern housing, but these seem to be nineteenth-century buildings and none is likely to go back as far as John Roy’s tenancy.   2. Roy 1777, 718, 749, 761, 775.   3. Irving and Murray 1864, 424.   4. Rankin 1874, 216–26; OSA 8 (1793), 121–7.   5. Rankin 1855, 147–8; 1874, 241, 247. For a history of the lands of Hallcraig, see Rankin 1874, 194–9. The house of Hallcraig, which William would have known well as a child, was described as ‘modern’ in 1793 (OSA 8, 132), so he probably visited its defensible predecessor. The eighteenthcentury house, adjacent to the earlier one, was demolished in the early twentieth century.   6. Rankin 1873, 562–3. The equation of the job title of ‘gardener’ with the role of a factor is made clear in a newspaper advertisement of an auction for the sale of some valuable land at Kilcadzow, for which the particulars could be obtained from ‘James Roy, Gardener at Lee’ (Caledonian Mercury, 29 September 1764).   7. Laurence 1717.   8. OPR Marriages 629/00 0020 0014 Carluke.   9. John Stewart of Lesmahagow, on the other side of the Clyde, had had a daughter named Mary in July 1692, OPR Births 649/10 5, although she would have been five years older than John and that seems unlikely. A little further away, another Mary Stewart was born in March 1703 in Neilston, near Newton Mearns, OPR 572/10 8. Perhaps more plausibly, Mary Roy may have been the Mary Stewart who was born on 3 April 1702 at Minnigaff, Kirkcudbrightshire: OPR Births 876/00 0010 0013. Her parents, William Stewart and Grisell McDougall, had Christian names that, although common enough, were to have some significance for John and Mary Roy. 10. OPR Births 629/00 0010 0051 Carluke. There are no subsequent clear records of Grizel, and she may have died in childhood. A trawl reveals that Grizal Ray [sic], spouse to James Gillespie, died in Corstorphine in July 1765 (OPR 678/00 0030 0174) but there seems to be no record of this marriage nor of where she came from. In Fowlis Wester, in Perthshire, Grizel Roy, of Monzie, married James Murray of Crieff, in May 1752 (OPR 357/00 0030 0322) but she was a member of a long established Roy family in the valley of the Earn. Down in Kirkcudbrightshire, at Twynholm, another Grizall Roy married Hugh McFarlin in October 1764 (OPR 883/00 0020 0007), but by that time the Grizel born in Carluke would have been forty-one, and there were many Roys in Twynholm. 11. OPR 629 000 0010 0062Z where the name is spelled ‘Sussanna’, and OPR 629/00 0010 0065 for James.



Foundations 19

12. Standing at the East end of the High Street, this church was extensively repaired in the mid-seventeenth century and a small bellcote was added in 1715. In 1799 it was replaced by the present St Andrew’s church, on Mount Stewart Street. The old building was knocked down, leaving now only the bellcote within the churchyard. 13. OPR Births 629/00 0010 0058 Carluke. 14. Both men are listed among the subscribers to Robert Wodrow’s The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland (1721), a detailed record which denounced the persecution of the Covenanters. 15. Cess Book for the County of Lanarkshire 1724–1725, South Lanarkshire Archives (001/6/1). Kirkton, an early seventeenth-century house with earlier origins, was demolished in 1959. 16. Rankin 1874, 251. 17. Irving and Murray 1864, 402, 415, 424–5. 18. Irving and Murray 1864, 415–17. For Walter Lockhart, see Rankin 1874, 186–96. 19. Rankin 1873, 562. 20. NRS Carluke Kirk Session CH2/56/3, 310. 21. NRS Carluke Kirk Session CH2/56/3, 332. Skirling, near Biggar, is less than twenty miles away. The fair, mainly devoted to the sale of horses, took place four times a year (RCAHMS 1967, 347, pls 141–2). The Kirk Session may have disapproved of some of the associated activities. 22. NRS Carluke Kirk Session CH2/56/3, 313, 332, 355, 383, 389, 393, 476. 23. Rankin 1874, 79–82; Scott 1868, vol. 2, 311–12; NRS CH2/56/3, 437, 441. 24. Rankin 1874, 113–14. 25. Robertson and Harvey 1983, 9–10. 26. Robertson 1974, 39–40; Robertson and Harvey 1983, 31. 27. DNB (J. Lloyd Williams 2004). 28. Osborne 1997, 15, 19, 84–5, 106. 29. Robertson and Harvey 1983, 23–4; NRS Carluke Kirk Session CH2/56/3/319–20. 30. Rossner 2011. 31. Chalmers 1888, 62, 64. 32. Skelton 1967, 6, where it was disarmingly described as ‘a mere guess’. 33. Lang 1856, 13. 34. Skelton 1967, 16n; Postal Museum archives, POST 59/3, reel 1. The next Establishment Book is of December 1747, by which time William was employed in the Military Survey. 35. The first ‘surveyors’ (as established by the Post Office Act of 1711) were not appointed in Scotland until 1760, but these men were not engaged in topographical work; they were inspectors whose job it was to protect the revenue of the service against the losses incurred by those intent on using unofficial channels to convey the post: Haldane 1971, 50–2, 224–35.

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36. Campbell 1832, 32. Campbell had changed his name from Callander when he inherited the estate (and the assumption of a baronetcy to which he was not entitled) in 1810. 37. Similarly, David Dundas, who joined the Military Survey of Scotland in 1752, made a plan of the enclosures on his family’s estate at Arniston in that year: Skelton 1967, unpaginated postscript. 38. Hewitt 2012, 63, 65. 39. The intricate relationships between the Dundas and Watson families have been teased out by Hewitt 2012, 61–70. David Watson’s younger sister Margaret married another Robert Dundas (died 1768); their son David worked on the Military Survey with William and was to become his lifelong friend. By his second marriage to Ann Gordon, the second Lord Arniston had a son, William (born in 1737), who was also to join the staff of the Survey. 40. Taylor 1966; de Clercq 2007. 41. Taylor 1966, 24. I am very grateful to Dr Gloria Clifton for searching through Taylor’s card index in Greenwich, on my behalf, in pursuit of this link between William and MacLaurin. 42. Grabiner 2002. 43. Tweddle 2007, 11–12. For a contemporary account of the life of MacLaurin, see Murdoch 1750, i–xiv. 44. DNB (J. Henry 2004). 45. Tweedie 1915, 135. 46. Henderson 1741, 372; Carlyle 1860, 52. 47. Murdoch 1750, vi. 48. Hewitt 2012, 61; Grabiner 1997, 312; 2002, 149; Withers 1999, 62–4. 49. Carlyle 1860, 32. The Royal Military Academy at Woolwich opened in 1741. 50. Mills 1982, 90; Tabraham 2007, 27–8, 30–1; Porter 1889, 158. In 1742 Campbell was in Edinburgh, designing the new Governor’s House in the heart of the castle and the defences at its main gate (NLS MS.1645 Z02/05a and 04a). He later became Sub-Director of the Corps of Engineers, see Porter 1889, 158, 160–2, 173, and Lawson 1966, 194–200. At the beginning of the rebellion in 1745 he was one of only three engineers serving in Scotland. 51. Short 1748, 582: ‘We [Short, Pierre Charles Le Monnier, and the Earl of Morton] found that the meridian Mark, which had been settled from Observations by the late worthy Mr Mac Laurin, was lost, by the taking down of a chimney, upon which it was fixed.’ 52. Murdoch 1750, x–xi. It was MacLaurin’s intention that the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, of which he was one of the founders, should print and distribute these new maps and charts: Mills 1982, 94. 53. RCAHMS 1951, lxii–lxvi. 54. Hedman 2004.



Foundations 21

55. Murdoch 1750, xi–xii; Carlyle 1860, 114. 56. NLS MS.1645 Z.02/07a–c. 57. James Short would later be the principal sponsor for William’s election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

2 The Map-maker: Developing ‘the Soldier’s Eye’

THE NEED FOR A MILITARY MAP OF THE HIGHLANDS

B

y the first week of December 1746 the Jacobite army had reached Derby, nearly 300 miles from Edinburgh but only 130 miles from London, and there was expectation of an imminent landing on the southeast coast by the French, the foremost Catholic power in Europe. Yet the swelling of the army’s numbers on the march southwards from Carlisle that the Prince had hoped for – and relied upon – had not happened. The King’s forces, under the Duke of Cumberland and Marshal Wade, were coming closer and the Jacobites risked being cut off. Reluctantly, the decision was taken to retreat to Scotland and to consolidate their forces there. On 20 December they re-crossed the Border. At the end of January, Lord George Murray and the clan chiefs persuaded the Prince that it would be prudent to return to the Highlands, and by 18 February Charles was in Inverness. On 8 April the Duke’s forces broke camp from their winter quarters in Aberdeen and set out on the 100-mile march to Inverness. On 12 April they crossed the Spey, and on 16 April, a day of hail and rain, the two armies finally engaged on Drummossie Muir, by Culloden. It ended in vengeful butchery in which the Highlanders were pursued into the streets of Inverness and far beyond.1 After four insurgencies, in 1689, 1715, 1719 and 1745, and abortive French invasions in 1708 and 1744, Cumberland had to ensure that the Jacobite cause could not be revived.2 In the days immediately after the battle, the Duke turned his attention to rebuilding Fort Augustus, which had been badly damaged, and to founding Fort George, at Ardersier on the shores of the Moray Firth. The re-fortification of the Highlands had begun. The Highlands had not been the theatre of the war, but it had been the recruiting ground for the rebels. After the rising in 1715 a certain



The Map-maker 23

amount had been done to bring the clan communities under surveillance and control. The Highland Companies that had been formed following the short-lived revolt led by John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, in 1689, were replaced by regular troops, some of which were placed in new barracks: at Inversnaid, on the north-easterly shores of Loch Lomond; at Bernera, at Glenelg beside the crossing to Skye; at Kiliwhimen, near the later Fort Augustus; and at Ruthven, in Badenoch. This framework of dispersed garrisons was slow to appear, and it attracted criticism; thus, in 1724 General Wade was appointed to assess the efficacy of the barracks and their communications. Neither Inversnaid nor Bernera had proved to be in key strategic locations, and Kiliwhimen was awkwardly sited, so Wade immediately began a programme of road-building which would provide much better connections for the forts of the Great Glen from Dunkeld and the Lowlands. Between 1724 and 1740 roads were constructed from Fort William to Inverness; from Dunkeld to Inverness, via Dalwhinnie, Ruthven and Aviemore; from Crieff to Dalnacardoch, in Glen Garry; and from Dalwhinnie to Fort Augustus.3 In these initiatives, and in all of the early phases of the response to the rebellion of 1745, the King’s forces faced a major handicap: the lack of reliable geographical knowledge. They desperately needed good maps that would enable army officers to make quick decisions. What maps there were had proved to be hard to come by. On 29 December 1745, General Hawley, the commander of the King’s army in Scotland, wrote to the Secretary of State: I am going in the dark: for Mareschal Wade won’t let me have his map … I could wish it was either copied or printed, or that His Majesty would please to lend it me. ’Tis for the service, or I should not be so bold.4

The map that Wade was hanging onto so doggedly was probably the one that had been prepared in 1731 by Clement Lempriere, a draughtsman attached to the Corps of Engineers.5 At a scale of 6.5 miles to 1 inch (Figure 2.1) it is above all a military and political map, and was, in effect, presenting the results of Wade’s investigations of the state of the Highlands in 1724. The scope of its topographical depiction is severely limited: it shows the main rivers and lochs, and their valleys, but beyond ‘The Boundary of the Highlands’ the uplands are stylised as an expanse of undifferentiated pimples. Wade’s ‘New Roads’ are shown, along with the forts and barracks that were put in place after the rebellion in 1715. The sites of the relevant battles since 1689, and the landings of foreign troops and of the Old Pretender, are all indicated as these might be a guide to future operations also. Most significantly, however, most of

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Figure 2.1  An extract from Clement Lempriere’s map A Description of the Highlands of Scotland (1731) showing, in red, the chiefs that turned out for the Old Pretender in the rebellion of 1715 and the number of men able to bear arms. The topographical value of the map is extremely limited. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

the annotations consist of more than thirty labels that show how many men there were in each area who were able to bear arms, and the chief to whom they held allegiance; these labels were differentiated between those who had joined the rebellion in 1715 (labelled in red ink), and those (in black ink) who had remained loyal to the Crown. Thus, in Glen Lyon and around the upper Tay, ‘E[arl] of Bradalbin’s Followers 1000  men’; in Strathspey, ‘Laird of Grant 1000 M[en]’; ‘Forbes of



The Map-maker 25

Strathdon 250 Men’, and so on. In the Highlands there was more red ink than black. No wonder Hawley wanted the map. Lempriere’s sheets remained in manuscript and were never printed. More readily available to the military was A New and Correct Mercator’s Map of North Britain, carefully laid down from the Latest Surveys and Most approved Observations, by Jn Elphinstone Esqr P[ractitioner] Engineer 1745. This6 had been published in London in March 1745 by Andrew Millar and was, inevitably, dedicated to the Duke of Cumberland. It cost two shillings and sixpence. The publisher was confident about the quality of his product. An ‘Advertisement’ at the bottom of the sheet reads: As the Geography of this Map differs greatly from all others hitherto published; it’s necessary to Observe that the authorities for these alterations are Mr Adair, Sr Alexr. Murray of Stanhope, Captain Bruce, William Edgar, Alexr. Bryce, and Murdoch Mackenzie, etc. So that it must be as Correct as possible till a New Survey of the Whole is made. The projection is Mercator’s or Wright’s and due Regard is had to the Oblate spheroidal Figure of the Earth without wch all Maps however just in other particulars are faulty. This being the first attempt that I know of to correct an Error of projection which affects above 2/3 of the Globes Surface.

These assertions struck the right notes, but John Elphinstone’s map was not one that was of much practical use to the army. It was a much smaller sheet than Lempriere’s MS, measuring only 68 by 54 centimetres, and it was at a much smaller scale, about 1:845,000 compared to about 1:380,000. Although, as the Advertisement stated, some of  the  component parts (such as Orkney by Murdoch Mackenzie, and  the  coasts of Caithness and Sutherland by Bryce) would have been  real improvements, the west coast and the islands were unchanged  from Blaeu’s  Atlas nearly  a century beforehand: the axis of Skye is still aligned almost East-West. More seriously, the Great Glen – straight as a die along the Highland Fault – was unaccountably turned by Elphinstone through an  angle of over 30 degrees at Fort Augustus. Some roads are shown,  but with little  accuracy, and there are lots of placenames, but apart from the coasts and lochs there is only scant and schematic topography. If they solely had Elphinstone’s map to guide them, travellers from, say, Stirling to Fort William would have expected their journey to be relatively direct and through the Lowlands. The serpentine route, and the difficulties to be encountered in negotiating Rannoch Moor and Glen Coe, would have been unwelcome surprises to men on the march. It was a bland, non-political presentation.

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There were none of the muster-strengths that Lempriere had shown, no battle sites, and no seats of local power. Those planning a campaign or a policing operation would indeed have been ‘going in the dark’. The officers in Cumberland’s army would have been acutely aware of this, and one of them, Lieutenant Colonel David Watson, was determined to take up the challenge. Born in 1704, David Watson7 was commissioned into the army, serving in Gibraltar and in the War of the Polish Succession (1733–5). In 1742 Robert Dundas petitioned for Watson to transfer to the Board of Ordnance as an Engineer and he was posted to Flanders, distinguishing himself in the defeat of the French at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. In 1745, after further action at Fontenoy and the siege of Ostend, he was promoted to Deputy Adjutant General to General Sir John Ligonier and then, as part of the response to the Jacobite rebellion, he was sent back to his native Scotland as Deputy Quartermaster General. Immediately after the Battle of Falkirk, in January 1746, he was rewarded with a promotion to the army rank of Lieutenant Colonel. In the aftermath of the decisive battle, Culloden, three months later, he did not disguise his contempt for the Highlanders and entered fully into the pursuit of the fugitives; he strongly believed that hanging them was more appropriate than banishment. More positively, he was convinced that if Scotland was to be unified – Highlands and Lowlands – and the threat of Jacobitism annihilated, new infrastructure and frameworks of control were urgently required. If that was to be done, the work would be focused on the western and central Highlands, and a map far better than those cobbled together by Lempriere and Elphinstone would be required. From this idea was born the Military Survey of Scotland, which was to turn out to be a landmark in British cartography and the most beautiful map of Scotland ever made. It was also the project that was to determine the direction of William’s life. There are no formal accounts of how the Survey was organised and undertaken, and such comments as have survived are fragmentary and were mostly written several decades after the event. Looking back on his work nearly forty years later, William told the story:8 Accurate surveys of a country are universally admitted to be works of great public utility, as affording the surest foundation for almost every kind of internal improvement in time of peace, and the best means of forming judicious plans of defence against the invasions of an enemy in time of war, in which last circumstances their importance usually becomes the most ­ apparent. Hence it happens, that if a country has not actually been surveyed, or is but little known, a state of warfare generally produces the first ­improvements in



The Map-maker 27 its geography … The rise and progress of the rebellion which broke out in the Highlands of Scotland in 1745 … convinced Government of what infinite importance it would be to the state, that a country, so very inaccessible by nature, should be thoroughly explored and laid open, by establishing military posts in its inmost recesses, and carrying roads of communication to its remotest parts. With a view to the commencement of arrangements of this sort, a body of infantry was encamped at Fort Augustus in 1747 … at which camp my much respected friend, the late Lieutenant-General Watson, then Deputy Quarter-Master-General in North Britain, was officially employed. This officer, being himself an engineer, active and indefatigable … first conceived the idea of making a map of the Highlands.

Watson’s role as Deputy Quartermaster General carried the operational responsibility for stores, munitions and logistics, for the planning of the disposition of troops, and for providing them with quarters. Good geographical knowledge was therefore a crucial component of his dayto-day tasks, and he needed a reliable map if he was to do any efficient planning. His thinking is illustrated by his proposals, in December 1747, for quartering detachments of five Highland companies in locations that would be the bases for constant patrols: in the Western Isles, Skye, Mull, the Small Isles, and throughout the western Highlands. Intelligence was to be bought by giving a compliant local informer ‘… a Reward, or filling him Drunk with Whisky, as often as [the commanding officer] may judge proper, which I’m confident is the only way to penetrate into the Secrets of these people’.9 If that intelligence was to be used speedily, the detachments had to have an immediate grasp of any placename or route that might be let slip. During and after the rebellion, he argued, officers had ‘… found themselves greatly embarrassed for want of a proper Survey of the Country …’. Such an argument was always likely to receive a positive hearing from the Duke of Cumberland who had a great respect for good military intelligence and its presentation.10 The Duke accepted Watson’s proposal and persuaded his father, George II, to approve ‘… making a Compleat and accurate Survey of Scotland’. That must have seemed to have established the nascent Survey on a firm basis although, as it turned out, adequate resources were never fully made available: the progress of the Survey depended heavily on financial support from Watson himself and from the Dundas family.11 THE SPECIFICATION OF THE GREAT MAP

Although the specification for the Survey, such as it was, must have been outlined by Watson, in discussion with his peers, it must also have

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been inevitably constrained by the absence of a robust budget, and by the need for speed: the new infrastructure across the Highlands was required as soon as possible. The specification would have had three principal components: the content to be depicted on the Great Map (as it came to be called); the technical framework that dictated its scale and geographical accuracy; and an outline of the personal qualities, experience and potential of a project manager to whom Watson could delegate most of the day-to-day operational matters. The content was determined by imperatives of the state: the military need for subjugation and governance12 (although the purpose of the completed map is impossible to discern just by looking at it). Thus, the hills and the high ground only needed to be drawn in a general way: all that mattered was their position, their general bulk, and their potential as barriers to an army on the march (Figure 2.2). Rather, it was the glens, and the extent of the comparatively level ground that was significant, for it was there that the new roads and the military posts could be built, or – if the worst came to the worst – where positions for a hostile engagement could be chosen. To these ends, the information that would indicate the ease of movement down a glen or over a pass had to be depicted, making it possible for a commander in the field to assess where they were, how readily the troops could traverse the next piece of country, or where a camp or a more permanent post should be established. The topographical details to be measured in would therefore include a bend in a road or a river; a prominent crag; a settlement, or a landmark building: all things that would enable the character of the immediate vicinity, including woodland and the extent of cultivation, to be sketched in. The Survey was intended to summarise this militarily useful intelligence, which could then be presented in an accessible form. There must also have been a technical specification set out, although a later description by one of the last surviving participants, David Dundas, suggests that some of the approach was pragmatic and that it was allowed to evolve. This work having proceeded from small beginnings, and as its ­continuation and its extension and completion from Year to Year arose from the circumstances of the Times, no fixed Plan was laid down for its Execution, nor were any great Trigonometrical or other operations performed, to ascertain critically the Limits and Boundary of the Whole. The whole line of the Coast, and of the Southern Border with England, was accurately surveyed and measured by General Roy, and was connected with many other measured Lines that crossed the Country. The Courses of all the Rivers and their

Figure 2.2  The Pass of Ballater, on Deeside, on the Fair Copy of the Military Survey of Scotland, an example of the tactical information that could have been provided to the army. Although the hill shading misrepresents the extent of the Craig of Balater (there is a wide expanse of level ground to its south, beside the river), the map shows that the only viable route for an army was through the narrow Pass. © The British Library Board, K.Top.48.25-1, a–f

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Branches; of all the principal Roads; and of the Lakes, salt or fresh were followed and measured; as well as such other intermediate and cross Lines as were found necessary for the filling up of the Country; and Intersections being taken to Right and Left ascertained innumerable minute Situations.

This approach was consistent with the contemporary advice for the preparation of extensive small-scale maps such as those covering an English county.13 In practice, this meant that the long lines (traverses) forming the framework of the Survey were observed along those roads that existed, down the river valleys, round the shores of lochs and along the coast, taking backsights and foresights with compass bearings to targets in the form of thin poles with flags; field notebooks were used to record the measurements and the bearings of each line. The measurements between the stations (temporarily marked by the flags) were made with a surveyor’s chain, accurately divided into standardised links.14 From this data the orientation and relative position of each line could be simply but crudely fixed. As they proceeded, offsets from the line would be taken (‘to Right and Left’) at measured points to significant points of detail – such as roads, settlements and prominent topographical features  – or by intersecting the angles to them. In a large sketchbook, each surveyor would make a simple record of the locations of his stations (the ends of each line, and the points from which any offsets were taken) and would draw ‘the face of the country’ adjacent to the line; this would be sufficient to enable the topography to be depicted when the surveys were pieced together. The measurements, notes and sketches were the building blocks by which the map would be constructed.15 As an Engineer and as someone acquainted with MacLaurin’s Newtonian mathematics, Watson would have known that the method adopted in the Highlands – a compass traverse, albeit an elaborate one – was a major compromise in standards, well below the much more accurate frameworks, based on triangulation, that had been established in France by the Cassini family, under orders from the state civil engineering organisation, the Ponts et Chaussées.16 There, between 1733 and 1744, in a huge programme of geodetic and astronomical observations, 800 triangles had been constructed across the country and nineteen bases had been measured. As early as 1735, Philippe Buache had advanced a proposal that this fieldwork should appear as a national series of maps which would cover the whole of France in 116 sheets. In the event, when printing began in 1738 it was for a series of just eighteen much more extensive sheets which was completed soon after the end



The Map-maker 31

of fieldwork in 1744.17 The far less ambitious scheme for mapping the Highlands of Scotland was a compromise, made necessary by the exigency of the resources available and by the need for a speedy resolution of the national emergency caused by the rebellion. Writing in 1785, William was nevertheless comfortable with the decisions that had been taken so long before; he had come to the view that the map produced by the Military Survey … possesses considerable merit, and perfectly answered the purpose for which it was originally intended; yet, having been carried on with instruments of the common, or even inferior kind, and the sum annually allowed for it being inadequate to the execution of so great design in the best manner, it is rather to be considered as a magnificent military sketch, than a very accurate map of a country.18

The third and final part of the design for the project to produce a map of the Highlands was the person specification of the project manager. In this, Watson faced a real problem of resources. Important as it was in the longer-term strategy for the pacification of the Highlands and for the unification of ‘North Britain’, the Military Survey of Scotland19 (as it has become known) was only one of many matters to be attended to in the period of reconstruction after the rebellion. Established Engineers were thin on the ground in Scotland, and two of the most experienced cartographers and surveyors, Clement Lempriere and William Edgar, had died in 1746. Watson therefore had little choice but to look elsewhere, outside the Corps of Engineers, for someone in civilian life who had some experience of surveying, the personality to stick at a creative but repetitive task, and few ties. Watson’s choice of William as the man to lead the Survey on the ground will have affected the planning and execution of the initial phases of work. Appointed as an Assistant Quartermaster, but with no ­experience of extensive cartography on the scale that was envisaged, William had not had the benefit of the training that had been put in place when the Royal Military Academy was established at Woolwich in 1741, nor had he been trained in the Drawing Room in the Tower of London. More fundamentally, he had not been a soldier either. Watson may have seen great potential in his protégé, but that potential had to be nurtured and realised. Thus, it is likely that the first phase of the Survey was essentially a pilot project, designed to test the specification and, crucially, to allow a period of training. That training had to encompass a number of elements: the development of a common understanding, between William and the soldiers who were to support him, of the

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surveying instruments and methods that they were to use; an introduction to the range of information that had to be depicted on the map; an immersion in how that information should be presented graphically (i.e. a ‘house style’); knowledge of the structure, practice and culture of the army; and how William, as a civilian specialist, should act to take charge of a nascent project in a military context. Crucially he had to begin to think like an officer in analysing the landscape from a military perspective. If that sense of focused reconnaissance could be achieved, then the making of the map would be a wholly creative process that would succeed in its aims. There was a lot that had to be done before any mapping could begin. IN THE FIELD

David Dundas recalled that William had ‘… commenced this operation in the neighbourhood of Fort Augustus, and for two years was singly employed in the Execution of it’.20 This is misleading as Paul Sandby, then aged sixteen, had been appointed as a draughtsman, the other key role in the production of the map. He had almost certainly been recommended for the job by his elder brother, Thomas, who had entered the Drawing Room in the Tower of London in 1743. There he had been trained by Clement Lempriere, who had been the Chief Draughtsman of the Board of Ordnance since 1727 and who had established its house style. Thomas was soon sent to Scotland to accompany an Engineer and was probably there for all of the Jacobite rebellion. He sketched the battle of Culloden and was in the Duke of Cumberland’s headquarters in Fort Augustus between May and July 1746. He would therefore have been in an ideal position to advance his brother’s interests when Watson first proposed the production of the Military Survey. Once the separate strands of the field-surveys had been pieced together, Paul Sandby was to be responsible for drawing the final Fair Copy of the map, using ink and watercolour. But first he too had to be trained in what was to be demanded of him. This was another job for Watson, and it invariably involved some travelling in the Highlands that first summer. Although there are no formal records to indicate the direction that William himself took when he set out from Fort Augustus to begin the Survey21 – nor of most of its progress thereafter – some of Paul Sandby’s movements have been reconstructed, in part from the dates appended to his drawings.22 In 1747 he was in Inveraray, Dumbarton, Fort William and near Aberfeldy in Strathtay, and other opportunities to draw may have been taken en route. We do not know whether



The Map-maker 33

Sandby was accompanied by William on all of these expeditions, but it is clear that in 1748 Paul was on the west coast with Watson – on Mull, and in Moidart and Lorn – providing him with the plans and illustrations for the reports on the medieval castles at Duart, Tioram and Castle Stalker, all of which were being considered for repair and refurbishment to receive new garrisons. It is in this period of preparation that William himself begins to emerge from the shadows. A single sheet of figures23 in the archives of the Atholl Estates records his ‘Measurements taken along His Majesties Military Road from Dunkeld to Blair in Atholl, 1747’, a distance of twenty miles. The paper also shows that this was only one of a number of similar tasks in that first season: to measure the roads from Inverness, Fort Augustus and Fort William by way of Blair Atholl and Dunkeld to Perth. These were roads that had been constructed by General Wade, and the task – though useful – may have been a practical training exercise. That summer also provides the best context for William’s first known plan,24 a maplet in ink and watercolour of the battlefield at Culloden which is signed ‘Will. Roy’. Stretching from ‘Colloden House’ to ‘Dallroy’, across the River Nairn to the south-east, it is at the same scale and in the same style as the Military Survey turned out to be (Figure 2.3). The detail of the boundaries is crisp, especially around the house, but the topography is very simply shown: there is no real indication of the direction of slope, and the strokes of watercolour that were to be such a distinctive feature of the Fair Copy of the Military Survey had not been perfected. The maplet is not titled and nor is the battle explicitly mentioned, but curving off to the east is a dotted line which is labelled ‘Tract of Artillery’. This clearly represents the ruts gouged out by Colonel William Belford’s guns as they were brought onto the battlefield – the guns that were to wreak such devastation in the ranks of the Highlanders. Such ruts would have lasted a long time in the uncultivated ground and so this plan could easily have been made in 1747, a year after the battle, or even later. It has every appearance of being an apprentice piece, undertaken to practice the surveying of a small area of ground, and to test the scale, the level of detail to be depicted, and the conventions of the final product. An additional and important bonus was that this work will have provided the opportunity to study minutely the topography of the site of a very recent engagement and to discuss (with Watson, who had been there on the day) the strengths and weaknesses of the positions taken up by the two armies. This was the very best way to train and develop ‘the soldier’s eye’ for tactical advantage in the landscape – the idea that was at the core of the

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Figure 2.3  The battlefield at Culloden, drawn by William, probably in 1747. The ‘Tract of Artillery’ (lower right) represents the ruts, still visible, cut by the heavy waggons. © The British Library Board, K.Top.50.44.1

Military Survey. There could hardly have been a better classroom nor a more relevant case study. As the surveyor in charge, William was the single individual with status. In the brief account of the Survey that David Dundas provided to Aaron Arrowsmith nearly sixty years later, he described the personnel that had been required. ‘Each Surveyor was attended by a Non Comd Off  [Non-Commissioned Officer] and 6 Soldiers as Assistants – One



The Map-maker 35

Figure 2.4  A watercolour by Paul Sandby of the Military Survey in the field near Loch Rannoch. The surveyor, holding his notebook, sights onto the distant flag (between the trees) while two soldiers measure the distance with a chain. Another flag is being taken to a new point. The horses carried the equipment in their panniers. The men walked. © The British Library Board, K.Top.50.83.2

carried the Instrument – Two measured with the Chain. Two for the fore, and back Stations – One as Batman.’25 Even though Dundas was outlining the complement after the initial stage of the Survey when the resources had been increased, a team of this size is exactly what Paul Sandby showed in a watercolour26 of a surveying party at work at Kinloch Rannoch in 1749 (Figure 2.4). (It is likely that Sandby was in the field for part of the season initially, so that he could absorb the variety of the landscapes that had to be depicted, until a backlog developed in the drawing-up of the results of the survey meant that he had to retreat to Edinburgh.) Returning to the technical aspects of the specification, there is some uncertainty around exactly which ‘instruments of the common, or … inferior kind’ were used. David Dundas remembered that they had ‘a good Plain Theodolite with a needle box made by Cole’, but this

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Figure 2.5 A circumferentor or ‘plain theodolite’ of the type that seems to have been used on the Military Survey (fig. 5). Fig. 2 is the simpler surveyor’s ‘cross’. From Adams 1791, pl. 14

terminology now confuses us. The theodolite that he referred to was a very simple instrument, better known as a circumferentor,27 consisting of two fixed sighting vanes and two movable ones on a calibrated circle, at the centre of which was a compass (Figure 2.5). The latter enabled the alignment of each traverse to be recorded relative to magnetic North, on which the whole Military Survey was oriented. This equipment sacrificed accuracy for speed but could, with care, be used for the long lines of the framework of the map, and also for logging the salient ‘drawing points’ of the detail that was to be sketched in.28 In his illustration of the surveyors at Loch Rannoch, Paul Sandby simplified the instrument further by omitting the detail of the compass, reducing it to a surveyor’s cross,29



The Map-maker 37

mounted on a simple wooden tripod at a convenient height. In addition to their popular circumferentors, Benjamin Cole, father and son, also made more sophisticated theodolites equipped with a telescope;30 it is possible that these were used on the Military Survey – they would certainly have made the few vertical heights recorded much easier to observe – but there is no direct evidence for this.31 The simpler the instrument the greater is the need for the surveyor to be conscious of its shortcomings and to take care to avoid disastrous cumulative errors, but otherwise it would have been very easy for William, and the other young men who joined him later, to learn how to use these instruments. The difficulties they would have faced in the field would rather have been in choosing the best lines for the framework of the survey; in observing an occasional vertical angle on a significant slope (e.g. in following a road over pass); and in analysing the landscape to ensure that the salient features were logged as the basis for sketches and depiction. Omissions or mistakes could not be readily rectified; there would be little, if any, opportunity to return to an area, and the pressure to keep making progress must have been relentless. William and his colleagues must have quickly settled into their annual cycle of work. In the summer months they were in the field, reverting to Edinburgh only for the winter. To provide the information necessary for ‘establishing military posts in [the Highlands’] inmost recesses, and carrying roads of communication to its remotest parts’, the team would usually have been working well away from any other army units and from substantial settlements, although they would occasionally have been able to make use of the ‘king’s houses’, the government-funded inns built beside some of the new military roads.32 For the most part, they had to camp throughout the fieldwork season, putting up with the midges and the weather of a Scottish summer. The standard tents for  the  soldiers, made of thick sailcloth of flax or hemp and pegged round the edge, were supported on two poles, each about 6 feet high and topped by iron pins which held a ridgepole about 7 feet long. Such a tent would have held five men. For officers – and this probably included William  – the tents were usually rather larger and often had an inner skin. The surveying equipment and the soldiers’ weapons may have been kept in a simple bell tent.33 One soldier would have been appointed as the cook, tasked with preparing something akin to the standard diet of bread, beer, meat stew and potatoes. There would have been little variation; a very small mobile unit such as this must have been difficult to supply on any regular basis, and in the Highlands there was limited opportunity to get anything extra from the local people.

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Military life in camp was as ordered as it could be, but William and his colleagues faced some difficulty in simply visiting every glen. They probably walked for the most part, and their equipment was carried in panniers strapped to a frame on horses’ backs rather than in wheeled carts (Figure 2.4). An idea of the conditions that they had to endure in their travels may be illustrated by those recorded in the comparatively gentle eastern fringes of the Highlands, in Aberdeenshire, where Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk had lamented that there was ‘… not one wheel carriage on the esteat, nor any one road that would allow it … In 1720 I could not in chariote get my wife from Aberdeen to Monymusk.’ (This was a journey of about twenty miles.) Wheeled traffic was impractical; everything was carried on horseback.34 In the uplands to the west the situation would have been considerably worse. The campaign by General Wade in 1725–33 to construct the military roads in the Highlands had resulted only in improving the routes linking Perth and Crieff to the upper Spey and to the length of the Great Glen from Fort William to Inverness. Despite its prominence, much of this network of roads was not robust because the standards of construction were constrained by the need to be as rapid and economical as possible.35 Their specification seems to have been more than an aspiration rather than a reality, and erosion was rapid and frequent. In some places the road-builders did no more than strip back the peat and soil to the stone brash beneath, and they relied on that to take the traffic. Such a surface (if not always its width) would have been sufficient for infantry, but the passage of artillery and a baggage train would have been extremely difficult. Elsewhere, away from the new roads, there were only the local paths and cattle-tracks: no one had ever had any need of anything better. These modest routes were passable, but still not easy, for a small party of military surveyors making their way on foot, leading their pack ponies. The presence of the soldiers may have provided some reassurance to William and to Paul Sandby, for the tents of the surveying team were often to be pitched in remote glens where they could not be certain of the reception that they would receive. Even in more settled times, Alexander Bryce, who was surveying the north coast of Caithness and Sutherland in the early 1740s under the patronage of Colin MacLaurin and the Earl of Morton, had had to travel armed; some of the inhabitants were aggrieved to think that his mapping (leading to improvements in navigation) would threaten their income from shipwrecks.36 Now, after the punitive raids and reprisals following Culloden, and the passing of the Acts that had seized Jacobite estates, curtailed the right of clan chiefs



The Map-maker 39

to dispense justice, and which had proscribed the bearing of arms and the wearing of Highland dress, resentment and mistrust must have been deep and widespread, though rarely explicit. In parallel with the rapid analysis of the landscape, William, and the other surveyors who joined him later, will have needed to assess the social picture also, for sensitivity and tact would often have been required. These were useful lessons for William that he would apply in reconnaissance missions throughout his later career. The winter months were spent in Edinburgh. The team will have lodged in the town but the Drawing Room was almost certainly in the new Governor’s House within the castle.37 It was there that the ‘original protraction’ of the Survey was drawn out for the first time. This process, overseen by Watson, involved the transfer from the field notebooks all of the basic information that they had collected about the traverses surveyed along the existing roads and down the river valleys. The measurements and the angles of the lines, relative to magnetic North, were drawn out onto paper so as to provide a graphical framework. Inevitably there would have been errors to reconcile; angles will have been incorrectly read off the theodolite, or inaccurately or illegibly recorded, and the number of chains laid down may have been incorrectly counted. Arrowsmith laconically wrote38 that ‘the connection of the Summer work of the several surveyors was often the subject mutual discussion’. In reality, when there were misclosures – gaps or overlaps in the geometry of the framework – those ‘mutual discussions’ are likely to have often been frustrating, exasperating and despairing, and will certainly have entailed many compromises to lever the framework to an acceptable ‘best fit’. Only then could the sketchbooks be brought into play and all of the topographical details filled in. Once those compromises had been agreed, it will have been Paul Sandby’s responsibility to produce the first rough draft of each area. The style of the Great Map conforms to the general conventions that had developed in military cartography,39 a consistency that was maintained by a core part of training: the copying of earlier maps and plans. Although it had various specific dialects, this common language of cartographic conventions facilitated the process for the surveyors and draughtsmen and made the maps easier for the consumers – the military officers – to read and to understand. Red was used for masonry (buildings and stone walls); brown for roads; yellow for arable land; green for woodland; and blue for water. In most cases, the detail recorded (e.g. the number of buildings in a settlement) was indicative rather than strictly accurate, although care was usually taken around the houses

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of  the nobility. The hills are strikingly and effectively depicted, using broad strokes of watercolour, laid down in the direction of slope, which could be made darker and closer to emphasise the steepness of the gradients. Although the Map is beautiful and informative, there were no illusions about its metrical accuracy. It was accepted as a sketch, a pragmatic, tactical representation of the landscape, so there was no fixing of latitude or longitude. Because it never reached publication, no scale was recorded on either the rough or the fair copies, and it was left to Aaron Arrowsmith, fifty years later, to work out that it was drawn out at 1 inch to 1,000 yards, i.e. 1:36,000.40 This is larger than the scale of the present Ordnance Survey Landranger series, which gives an indication of the ambition of the project. It can never have been part of the plan to restrict the staff in the field to a single surveying team; greater manpower was needed if the Survey was to proceed at an appropriate pace, but suitably experienced officers were thin on the ground. In April 1748 the Board of Ordnance told the King of the great difficulty of recruiting Engineers; there were only twenty-nine of them, four of whom were in Scotland.41 As a result, the King approved the appointment of six Sub-Engineers and ten Practitioner Engineers. However, in June, Watson learned that two additional staff allotted to the Survey would be posted elsewhere. Despite this setback, at some point William was joined by Thomas Howes and John Manson, although it was not until late March 1750 that permission was given to recruit three more assistants. Gratifyingly, Watson’s suggestions on these had been approved: Hugh Debbieg, Practitioner Engineer, who had been in Flanders in 1747 under Dougal Campbell; and John Williams and William Dundas, ‘both in the Company of Cadets [i.e. the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich] in which they have served three years’. Watson immediately put in an order for twelve dozen pencils, six penknives and 200 quills.42 David Dundas, Watson’s nephew, who had also been at the Royal Academy in Woolwich, was to join in 1752.43 In addition to Paul Sandby, the draughtsmen included Charles Tarrant and, towards the end of the Survey, John Cleve Pleydell. William now became a manager, with all of the creative satisfaction and small exasperations that this role brings. He was responsible for the tactical operation of the Survey, matching individuals to tasks, and putting procedures and checks in place that would ensure that the cartography would be consistent in quality. William’s new role will not have been straightforward: he had a number of teams in the field, so



The Map-maker 41

this was management at a distance. This is always a complex matter, especially when, as here, teams are mobile, can only be reached by letter, and have an uncertain timetable. It required absolute clarity of instruction, tact, empathy, decisiveness and forethought, and complete trust on both sides, born of good training. It is also where strength of personality comes into play. To complicate matters further, William was a civilian in a military context, a disjunction that had to be handled with great care. It is not clear to whom William allocated each area of the country to survey; all we know is that he himself took on the survey and measurement of the whole coastline, and of the southern Border with England, which then had to be connected with the measured traverses that crossed the country.44 It was an early sign of leadership that William took this on, as it was critical to the integrity of the Survey: the coast and the Border formed the frame, into which every other part of the mapping had to fit; the map of mainland Scotland would at last be the right shape. The coasts had a military significance also: they were the curtain through which any invasion might come. During the rebellion of 1745 the French had landed at Montrose so it was not out of the question – in the context of eradicating or minimising the threat from Jacobitism – that the Scottish coast might again be seen as vulnerable. Tackling the coasts was a huge undertaking, especially on the western seaboard where the sea-lochs penetrate so deeply, vastly increasing the length of the shoreline. Good work had been done in the North by Alexander Bryce and by Murdoch Mackenzie but there were hundreds of miles of shore yet to cover. William evidently enjoyed the challenge; as we shall see, William’s description of the intricate relationship between land and sea on the broken shores of Sutherland suggests that he remembered this passage of his life with considerable affection.45 The Border with England was important too, although since the union of 1707 it could be said to be more symbolic and administrative than critical. Its definition had been based upon descriptions rather than mapping,46 so William must have been conscious of an unusual responsibility in fixing it graphically for the first time. In the east, the legal position of Berwick-upon-Tweed as part of England had been recently resolved by the Wales and Berwick Act of 1746, but in his uncorrected draft of the Survey the Border line still followed the Tweed as far as Carham. In the West the line was along the Sark, the Scots’ Dyke, the Liddel Water and the Kershope Burn, but on the high ground of the Cheviots the Border was unmarked and must have presented quite a challenge to a conscientious man.

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THE SURVEYORS AND THE DRAUGHTSMEN

Farther north, the wilder state of the Highlands, and the specification of the Survey, demanded that the surveyors be independent, self-reliant and resilient, yet able to be team members as well as specialist team leaders. They must have been selected partly on the basis of these qualities, and as they were young, and as their time on the Survey was at a formative stage in their lives, their potential was to be largely realised in their later careers. They were a diverse but, for the most part, a formidable group of men. As this was a formative time for William too, it is worth digressing to consider the talents, characters and the subsequent achievements of those with whom he spent the years on the Survey – or at least those winters in Edinburgh. Hugh Debbieg (1731–1810), possibly from Norfolk, began his career in the Artillery but it was as an Engineer that he served under St Clair in the futile attack on L’Orient in Brittany in 1746, and in 1747 in Flanders. After education at Woolwich, he became a Practitioner Engineer and assisted Dougal Campbell from July to September 1749 in surveying the course of the new road to be built between Newcastle and Carlisle – the want of which had prevented General Wade from cutting off the advance of the Jacobites in the winter of 1745. He stayed in the Military Survey of Scotland for less than eighteen months (and William may have been glad of this) as in August 1751 he was posted to Chatham to survey the defences there. Serving later in North America, he was with Wolfe when he died, and was included by Benjamin West in his famous painting of that scene. In 1767 he was in France and Spain on a spying mission, examining harbours, an achievement for which he never felt sufficiently rewarded. Nevertheless, he was steadily promoted, becoming a full General in 1803, despite a feud with the Duke of Richmond (the Master General of the Ordnance) which led to a court martial and a reprimand, and a dispute with Pitt (probably with some justification) about remuneration. Brave and effective, but argumentative and stubborn, ‘in general he appealed through his ability, not his personality’.47 Far less is known of John Williams, who was also sent to the Military Survey in March 1750, his first posting after Woolwich. He may have left Scotland before the others, at the point that the mapping was winding down in 1755, and three years later he was in North America, under General Abercrombie for the attack on the forts on Lakes George and Champlain (although he missed the battle at Ticonderoga). In 1762, when the British were trying to expel the French from the West Indies, as



The Map-maker 43

a Captain-Lieutenant he took part in the siege and capture of Martinique and, when war was also declared against Spain, he constructed one of the bastions in the successful siege of the strong fort of El Moro in Havana. At some point he was badly wounded on active service and lost an eye. He went on leave, but when returning from Falmouth to New York in the winter of 1763–4, he was shipwrecked on the coast of North Carolina, losing all of his possessions, valued at £1,200. After a fortnight ‘without shoe or stocking and without seeing a bit of bread’, he and his wife had had to travel over 600 miles overland to get back to New York. In June 1765 he applied to the Master General of the Ordnance for an allowance of £600.48 The third recruit to the Survey in 1750, also fresh from Woolwich, was William Dundas. Born in 1737, he was the second son of Watson’s brother-in-law, Robert Dundas (the second Lord Arniston) and his second wife, Ann Gordon of Hallcraig and Milton. He had apparently been sent from Scotland to the Royal Military Academy when he was nine, and perhaps bringing him back to Scotland was an honourable way of getting him closer to his family again. He may not have been coping very well, for he was certainly hopeless with money and was deeply in debt by the time he was twenty-one. Coming to the Military Survey at the age of twelve or thirteen, it is perhaps unlikely that he was able to play a role equal to that of the other surveyors, and this may just be an example of family patronage at its less successful. Subsequently, with William and with David Watson he left Scotland for southern England and in 1756 he surveyed part of the fortifications around Portsmouth. Thereafter he rose to be a Captain of Engineers, and by 1769 to the rank of Major in the 68th Regiment of Foot, a position that he still retained seven years later.49 More successful, but in a wholly different mould from the others, was Thomas Howes (1728–1814). It is profoundly unclear how he came to join the Military Survey, what skills he brought to it, or how he acquired them. A graduate of Clare College, Cambridge in 1746, he seems to have got on well with Paul Sandby who sketched his likeness more than once. After perhaps six or seven years of military or quasi-military life, he reverted to what must have been his original intention and was ordained a deacon in London in 1754. He became a priest a year later and took over his father’s living at Morningthorpe, in Norfolk, and then two other parishes, although he was probably an absentee. A bachelor, he spent most of his time in Norwich, devoting himself to research and writing. His principal outlet was Critical Observations on Books, Antient and Modern – in effect, a single-author

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academic journal – which was issued in parts between 1776 and 1807. His studies focused at first on ancient chronologies before turning to extensive criticism of unitarianism.50 In contrast, John Manson, whose surname strongly suggests that he came from the far north-east of Scotland, had certainly had some relevant experience before he joined the Survey. Although there is some confusion about the dates, he seems to have been a Practitioner Engineer, serving in Gibraltar, and then spent eighteen months in the Drawing Room in the Tower of London before being posted to Scotland. His time with the Survey must have been successful as in 1755 he had the responsibility of being the sole Engineer in the Channel Islands, and in 1757 he was promoted to Sub-Engineer, with the rank of Lieutenant.51 His role in the Survey will have been that of a surveyor, rather than a draughtsman. Under Watson’s direction and tutelage, and aided by the experience that Manson and Debbieg had already gained, William and the others were able to develop the ‘soldier’s eye’: the keen appreciation of what had to be depicted on the Map for it to be militarily useful. The final depiction, however, fell to the draughtsmen. Although each of them may have been called upon to assist with the surveying from time to time, their role was to create the ‘original protraction’ of the Map, providing a coherent ink and watercolour drawing as the data from the traverses and the sketchbooks were pieced together. In his interview with Arrowsmith in 1806, David Dundas specifically named three draughtsmen: Paul Sandby, Charles Tarrant and John Cleve Pleydell. For Paul Sandby, one of the most famous names in British watercolour painting, his years in Scotland proved to be a solid foundation for his long career. In 1751 he left Edinburgh briefly to publish a set of engravings in London, taking time beforehand to undertake a commission for the Duke of Buccleuch at Drumlanrig in Dumfriesshire.52 As an artist he was very versatile (Figure 2.6) but the landscapes that he produced for the Duke were more to his liking than mapping. After producing the Fair Copy of the Survey of the Highlands, and a reduction to a quarter scale in 1753, he never again worked in cartography; his contribution, inevitably, was to make the Great Map not only informative but beautiful. One of his most important tasks was to render the three-dimensional landscape in two dimensions; in doing so, he took the rather weak and ambiguous convention for a slope and invigorated it with broad, strong brushstrokes and gradations of colour. The unconventional result ‘is undoubtedly more painterly than cartographic’.53 Despite the boldness of his topography he could also

The Map-maker

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Figure 2.6 A watercolour, known as Portrait of a Draughtsman, attributed to Paul Sandby. This is probably a portrait of William during the Military Survey (cf. Figure 6.4). National Galleries of Scotland (D5339A.21), purchased 1993

work with great delicacy, as is evident in the detailed treatment of the boundaries and grounds of the major houses. His life, however, was not all work; while in Edinburgh he had the opportunity to immerse himself in artistic society and to get to know, among others, the architect Robert Adam, and his family; Allan Ramsay, father and son, poet and portrait painter, respectively; and John Clerk of Eldin, and his father, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik.54 When he went south to London55 he was able to continue the long collaboration with his brother, Thomas, who, having served with the Duke of Cumberland in Scotland, now continued to enjoy royal favour at Windsor. For Paul, this entrée meant that he became the drawing  master to various members of the household

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(­including, in 1771, The Prince of Wales), and then Chief Drawing Master at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1768. In that same year, Paul and Thomas were founder members of the Royal Academy which ‘evolved rapidly into a scion of the Hanoverian fiscalmilitary state’.56 In the 1770s, Paul was touring in Wales with Sir Joseph Banks (who was to become one of William’s closest friends), producing influential views of landscape and industry, and recording a country in transition. Versatile and prolific, he was also an innovator: he learnt to etch while he was in Edinburgh; he adopted the use of body colour; and he later revolutionised printmaking by the acquisition and development of the technique of making aquatints.57 He was greatly esteemed for most of his life, but his reputation declined as topographical drawing was gradually accorded  a lower place than  landscape painting, and he was seen as simply paving the way for Girtin and for Turner.58 More recently, however, his importance has been re-established,59 not least as the large number of his works in the Royal Collection have become better known. There is no doubt that William will have learnt an immense amount from Paul, lessons that would become evident in his own cartography, his fine lettering and in his use of watercolour in technical drawings. It is likely that the two other draughtsmen employed on the Survey, Tarrant and Pleydell, also benefited, directly or indirectly, from Paul’s lead. Charles Tarrant (1728–1818), from Poole, in Dorset, was a labourer in the Drawing Room at the Tower of London in 1748 until he was selected by William Skinner, the Chief Engineer, to work in Scotland, particularly on plans for Fort George at Ardersier and for Edinburgh Castle. He seems to have joined the Military Survey in about 1752, but he had been attached to the Tower as a draughtsman from 1750 and was to remain so until 1755 when he gained his warrant as an Engineer. With a fine cartographic style, from 1763 to 1776 he was a draughtsman for the Board of Ordnance in Ireland, and then concentrated on the building of canals, including work on the Shannon Navigation; he also became a Wide Streets Commissioner for Dublin. Steady promotions meant that by 1802 he ended his career as a Major General. He never married, yet he left five children.60 John Cleve Pleydell (1736–1816) almost certainly came from Edinburgh. He joined the Survey at a comparatively late stage (when the work was focused on southern Scotland) and remained an Engineer thereafter.61 By 1768 he was also a Lieutenant in the 12th Regiment of Foot when he published An Essay on Field Fortification, a translation of a Prussian manuscript. In 1782 he was made a Captain Engineer and a



The Map-maker 47

Lieutenant Colonel in the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, and in 1795 he published Military Observations in a Tour through Part of France, French Flanders, and Luxembourg, in which he explicitly described what he saw from a soldier’s point of view. William will have continued to bump into him for the rest of his life, not least at Court as, sometime between 1787 and 1795, Pleydell had been appointed as an Equerry to the Duke of Gloucester, the younger brother of the King, an impressive final elevation for one who had started on a rather different career path. THE LOWLANDS, THE COAST AND THE RELEVANCE OF ANTIQUITIES

‘In 1752, the Highlands being nearly finished, it was determined to extend the Survey over the S. of Scotland also.’62 It is not clear why this decision was taken as there was little or no military reason for doing so. By and large, the Lowlands of southern Scotland had not been a recruiting ground for the Jacobites, and there were no punitive expeditions through them after Culloden. No new military posts or armed patrols were planned or needed. A higher priority might instead have been accorded to surveying the Hebrides and the Northern Isles (which was never done) because they could, conceivably, have been staging posts for an invasion. Presumably the move to southern Scotland was simply a matter of completeness, as the existence of the survey team provided the opportunity to have overall coverage of the mainland – a first essential step towards a national map of Scotland. It was at this point that the final recruit to the team of surveyors was brought on board. This was David Dundas, one of the sons of Robert Dundas (an Edinburgh merchant and a cousin of the Dundases of Arniston) and of his wife, Mary Watson, David Watson’s sister. Born in 1736, David Dundas had intended to study medicine, but his uncle David had persuaded him to try the army: a good decision as it turned out.63 He became a cadet in the Royal Military Academy in 1750, leaving in 1752 to join the Survey, where he was immediately put under William’s tuition; it seems that he was keen to learn, and that William was keen to teach. Even though there was a ten-year difference in their ages, the two of them would remain close friends for the rest of their lives. David’s arrival in the Survey was to be a milestone in his career as it introduced him to the importance of topography in practical tactics, a subject in which he would become Britain’s leading exponent. After the Survey he returned to Woolwich for a while until he was appointed as an Engineer in 1755. In 1759 he changed tack and joined the dragoons,

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seeing service in Germany and in Cuba where, like John Williams, he was present at the fall of Havana in 1762. Although he began to focus his mind on the training needs of the army, he spent eleven years as Quartermaster General in Ireland, then as a Colonel in the 2nd Irish Horse. In 1783 he resigned to concentrate on his hugely successful Principles of Military Movements, Chiefly Applied to Infantry, which was published in 1788. His aim was to radically improve the army’s training and drill, and to influence tactics, particularly in the use of heavy infantry. Later described as the greatest tactician of his age, his ideas were enormously influential and were utilised by the British army well into the nineteenth century. In this promulgation of good practice, born of experience and careful analysis, it is not surprising that David and William got on well for they were serious and disciplined individuals who applied themselves thoughtfully to any job in hand. In another age they would probably both have been university academics. Knighted in 1804, at the age of seventy-one David decided on another change in direction, and he got married. Still astonishingly active, he crowned his career by being Commander-in-Chief of the army from 1809 to 1811. Born ten years later than William, he outlived him by thirty years, dying in 1820. Though said to be austere, ‘the written work from his middle age and later years show him to have been among the most intelligent and knowledgeable of his officer contemporaries’.64 That all lay in the future. The first task for William and David was to take forward the survey of southern Scotland. Although there is little information about how the work was organised and divided, we do know that William spent much of the summer of 1752 recording the coastline between the Clyde and the Solway, and the line of the English Border. In the only one of his progress reports to have survived,65 written from Berwick-upon-Tweed, he told Watson that he had walked 445 miles from Hamilton, via Glasgow, and then along the coast. He had chalked up 1,058 survey stations, implying that the average interval was approximately half a mile in length. It seems that the last 120 miles, from Dumfries, on the north shore of the Solway and along the Border to the mouth of the Tweed, had taken him five weeks, although no doubt his daily average would have varied considerably, depending upon the complexity of the line that he was tracing, and upon any diversions that he felt were necessary. In his report he was rehearsing some of the results of this long linear reconnaissance, detailing where rivers could be forded, the state of the roads, and summarising the land use in the area. To the soldier’s eye this was all information that could potentially be useful to a commander in the field.



The Map-maker 49

The 300 miles of shore from the mouth of the Clyde to the River Nith at Dumfries has a variety of character that is broadly representative of the whole coastline of mainland Scotland. The broad sweeps of Ayrshire give way to a rougher edge on either side of Ballantrae, and then to the green fields and cliffs of the Rhins of Galloway (Figure 2.7); the sands and mud of Luce Bay and Wigtown Bay provide a contrast to the deeply

Figure 2.7  William’s survey of the coast of the Rhins of Galloway, showing the patchwork of the protracted copy of the Lowlands, and two antiquities: Dunskey Castle, south of Portpatrick and, 6 km north, the large prehistoric promontory fort of Kemp’s Grave (Kemp’s Walk). © The British Library Board, K.Top.48.25-1, a–f

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indented and beautiful shores of Kirkcudbright, and finally the coastline softens once again below Criffel at the mouth of the inner Solway. However you measure it, the coast of mainland Scotland is enormously long, even though the distance to be walked on the convoluted western coast would have been substantially reduced by simple triangulation (intersection) to inaccessible points across some of the sea-lochs. A conservative assessment might suggest that he walked somewhere between 1,800 and 2,000 miles. If the average length of a traverse was indeed a little under half a mile, then he may have plotted well over 4,000 survey stations in surveying the whole circuit, and – to add a further level of complication – a good number of those stations needed to be tied into the traverses that ran across country.66 Whatever the numbers really were, to undertake such a journey, and to maintain consistency and quality, demanded a special patience: a conscientious and meticulous approach, maintained day after day for months on end. There would have been some compensation in the beauty and in the constant change of scenery, but natural and man-made obstacles, and rain, fog, wind and sun may sometimes have taken the edge off that. It may at times have been a gruelling task, but William clearly enjoyed his reconnaissance and survey of the coast, and the shoreline of Britain was to remain one of his abiding interests and professional specialities. Looking back, twenty years later in his study in London, he recalled one particularly remote stretch – the wild shores of northern Ross and western Sutherland – with a warmth that is in marked contrast to the careful, dispassionate objectivity of the rest of his published writing. This, he felt, was an area of the Highlands ‘so very singular’ as to deserve to be described in greater detail: [A] part of Coygach, Assynt, and Edirdachillis, stretching along the northwest coast, as far as Loch Inchard, being in length about twenty-four miles, and in breadth eight or ten. This, though appertaining to the mountainous region of the country, is nevertheless very different from the adjoining Highland districts; for without being so remarkably high, it is infinitely more rugged and broken than any other part of Britain. In order to convey any tolerable idea of a country so very extraordinary in its nature, we may suppose some hundreds of the highest mountains split into many thousands of pieces, and the fragments scattered about. Between these lumps of rocks are numberless ponds of fresh water. Here and there, too, a cottage is to be seen, with a spot of cultivated ground, not in general tilled, for it is but in a few places that it is possible to make use of a plough, but dug with a mattock in the interstices between the splinters of the rocks. The wood to be met with here is chiefly birch; without, however, growing to any great size: and through



The Map-maker 51 the general mass the sea, from distance to distance, indents itself far into the land, forming a scene the most wild and romantic that can be imagined.67

The dogged recording of the coast was to be good training for the vast and complex data gathering that would also be demanded by some of William’s later projects; more immediately, the lessons learned from the progress of the Survey were distilled into a set of standards: ‘Orders and Instructions to be observed by Colonel Watson’s Assistants in Reconnoitring, Examining, Describing, Representing and Reporting, any Country, District, or particular spot of Ground’. These i­ nstructions – reprinted here, in a later form, as Appendix 2 – were prefaced by a belief that ‘the encampments, marches and every possible movement proper for an army to make in the field entirely depend on a just and thorough knowledge of the country’, and they outlined those aspects of the character of an area that needed to be recorded in a military reconnaissance. In setting out the approach that William had adopted, they reveal his meticulous methods and his anxiety that others – particularly those who joined the Survey in 1750 – would fall short unless they were told exactly what to do. A stern admonition was given To avoid ever trusting anything to memory, but constantly to sketch and mark memorandums with method; and regularly in travelling the road, and from time to time, at stated distances, to collect, digest, enlarge, and vary these memorandums and sketches before quitting the ground, so that every thing may be as correct, explicit and expressive as possible. Great and many are the inconveniences that continually arise from not duly attending to this precaution, and trusting too much to one’s own memory …

In their title, these instructions were credited to Watson; although, as the senior officer, he will have signed them off, in the way that they are expressed it is apparent that they were drafted by William and were born of his experience in the first phases of the Survey. Later, when they appeared in printed form, they were explicitly titled ‘General Roy’s Instructions on Reconnoitring’.68 Certainly, there were distractions from a strict specification for the Great Map. The sites of some of the recent battles – Killiecrankie, Glen Shiel, Falkirk – were marked as these had some relevance in the military landscape, but antiquities, even prominent ones, must have been low on the list of priorities for depiction. Nevertheless, William was beginning to see some of them in a different light, for he had become interested in the disposition and tactics of former armies, especially – given his Classical education – the greatest fighting force in the ancient world, the Roman army. While he was surveying the line of the Border in 1752,

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he was intrigued by reports that a Roman building had been unearthed twenty years earlier at Netherby, to the north of Carlisle, on the south side of the river from Kirkandrews-on-Esk (Figure 2.8). He took considerable pains to obtain from the incumbent at Kirkandrews, the Reverend Richard Baty, the plan that he had made at the time of the discovery. It proved to be a bathhouse of a classic design from the time of the Emperor Hadrian (ad 117–138), serving a fort that had been an outpost of Hadrian’s Wall. The baths consisted of a series of rooms, throughout which the heat was carefully graduated from cool to hot, all provided by a well-preserved heating system under the floors and up the walls. It was a fascinating construction, and William was hooked. That same year, and in 1753, he made detailed plans of a small number of other archaeological sites; these probably included the Roman remains at Birrens and Burnswark in Dumfriesshire, and he certainly recorded the earthworks of the Roman fort at Castledykes in Lanarkshire.69 From the military point of view this additional level of scrutiny of the tactical landscape did make some sense, and it was a topic that William was to find increasingly absorbing. PRODUCTS AND RESULTS

Although there had been aftershocks in the Highlands – including the unsolved Appin Murder in 1752, and the betrayal of the Elibank Plot (a plan to incite a further insurrection) in 1753 – the Jacobite cause had lost all momentum and the Prince had begun his peripatetic life in Europe. The pressure was off, and the products of the Survey were emerging. At the end of each field season the notebooks and the sketchbooks had been brought together in the Drawing Room in Edinburgh Castle, so that the data could be wrestled into an acceptable initial graphical form: ‘the protracted copy’. In the first phase of the Survey this covered the area to the north of the Highland Line (with a few, more southerly additions) and eventually consisted of eighty-five rolls: strip-maps, running north– south, built up from smaller sheets that were most probably drawn out in an initial form while the team was still in the field. Once agreed, this first version would then be used to construct and prepare the final Fair Copy: on these consolidated sheets the topography was vividly painted by Paul Sandby to produce something of the three-dimensional effect that was desired. Each year, Watson would take the results down to London for inspection by the Board of Ordnance and by the King himself. Sometime in 1753 Paul Sandby was briefly back in Scotland, specifically to produce a reduction of the Map to a much more manageable

Figure 2.8  William’s survey of the lower Esk from Canonbie to Gretna. The extent of cultivation is stylised but the Roman bathhouse at Netherby is pinpointed; the inset plan is of the Norman earthwork castle of Liddel Strength. © The British Library Board, K.Top.6.5

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one-quarter scale; for this he was paid the very substantial sum of 100 guineas. William had produced a reduction of an extract of the Great Map to show the ‘King’s Road’ from Stirling into Perthshire (Figure 2.9); this may have been a test piece and a proof of concept for the wider work that Sandby undertook.70 A second version of the full reduction was made, probably by William whose work in this was acknowledged; his payment would have been considerably lower. In 1806 David Dundas told Aaron Arrowsmith that in 1754 the survey of the whole of Scotland had been completed, exclusive of the Isles. After the production of the protracted copy of the Lowlands, William would have been waiting for orders as to his next move. He busied himself by devoting his time to the recording of those antiquities which might most closely complement the military brief for the Great Map. In particular, for much of 1755 he focused on the remains of the Antonine Wall, the great Roman frontier work that had been constructed in the later second century between the Firth of Forth and the Clyde. The idea of such a stop-line (to use a more modern phrase) was not part of the strategy or tactics of the Georgian army although, had such a linear barrier existed there in 1745, the Jacobites might have been successfully checked in their advance. We do not know whether William consciously made this link or whether he was more broadly interested in antiquarian discovery and the opportunities that the topography of the isthmus provided, both to the Romans and his own contemporaries. Despite its pragmatic and unambitious specification, the sheer extent and scale of the Survey had made it an expensive undertaking. Soldiers from General Churchill’s regiment had certainly been detailed to assist,71 but the amounts required for the salaries, equipment, supplies, guides, interpreters and subsistence for the surveyors also had to be found. The total cost is unknown; most of it was ‘paid out of the contingencies and extraordinary expense of the army’ although some of it was picked up by Watson and the Dundas family. Unaccountably, Watson stumped up for the salaries of (David?) Dundas, John Pleydell and one other for some months, and he bore a major expense in the provision of five horses for over five years. It is unclear whether Watson paid William’s salary throughout (which seems unlikely), or only met the cost of the reduction of the Survey to a smaller scale. After Watson’s death, his brother made a claim on the government for nearly £5,000.72 Even though the Treasury was extremely slow to pay, William was very conscious of his debt to his benefactors, and in 1755 he presented to Robie Dundas a full and beautifully prepared extract from the Military Survey, specially centred on the family seat at Arniston.73 Given all



The Map-maker 55

Figure 2.9  A reduction of part of the Military Survey of Scotland, a quarter of the original scale, showing The King’s Road from Stirling into the Highlands. Probably made by William Roy and Paul Sandby, c. 1753, as a proof of concept for a reduction of the whole Survey. © The British Library Board, K.Top.48.64

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that David Watson had done for the Survey, it is especially ironic that barely thirty years later the whole thing was not credited to him but was already being referred to in the press as ‘General Roy’s map’. That was evidently also the premise for Arrowsmith’s conversation with David Dundas in 1806, the record of which was headed ‘Queries respecting General Roy’s Map of Scotland’ before this was struck through and Watson’s name substituted instead.74 It was to be part of William’s luck – or a result of his single-minded success and effectiveness – that his name would continue to be attached to the things that he had had a hand in. The protracted copy of the survey of southern Scotland was clearly finished off in a hurry: the topography was all depicted but relatively few placenames are included. No Fair Copy was ever prepared. Although Watson seems to have held on to some of the minor products of the Survey, the bulk of the maps had been sent to the Duke of Cumberland, probably in 1755, and when the Duke died ten years later they were transferred to the Royal Library. Subsequently they were lent to William who retained them for the rest of his life; they were then returned to the Royal Library, and thence were deposited in the British Museum in 1828.75 Even though William later considered that the Map had been correctly specified for the purpose for which it was originally intended, there is no clear evidence that it was actually employed for any military object, although Watson must have actively used the knowledge that had been gained each summer season in the Survey, communicating relevant information to colleagues in the army and probably influencing the disposition of troops. He will also have been in a good position to identify and to promote the further, more detailed work that was needed, not least among his fellow Commissioners for the Forfeited Estates (those confiscated from prominent Jacobite families after the rebellion) who needed maps to promote the agricultural improvement and new economic activity which they believed would stop the Highlanders slipping back to old allegiances. His instructions for surveyors – almost certainly drafted first by William – were tabled at the first meeting of the Commission in June 1755.76 Even though it was never fully finished, the Great Map was not entirely ignored or forgotten in Scotland.77 The information that it contained had been sensitive military intelligence at the time that it was compiled, but as the years went on it had all become of more general interest only. In the 1760s, after William’s successful service in the Seven Years War, the King lent William the archive copies of the Military Survey



The Map-maker 57 with permission and with the view that he might derive advantage from reducing and publishing an improved map of Scotland. [William] accordingly collected the most accurate observations then extant, that could verify and bound the work, and had made considerable progress, when other military and scientific pursuits intervening, he lost sight of this object, and never afterwards resumed it.78

William seems to have been quite happy to share the information that he held. Thus, for instance, in 1778, John Ainslie of Edinburgh advertised the publication of A Map of the Country upwards of Fifty Miles round Edinburgh … The Roman roads and camps are inserted by Lieutenant Colonel Roy and Dr James Lind, who were at the utmost care in assisting the Surveyor in making the above map the most complete ever published in Britain.79 William was clearly a partner in this project, so did Ainslie have direct access to the protracted copy of the Lowlands? It is not unlikely as, a few years later, in 1785, first-hand knowledge of the accuracy of ‘General Roy’s map’ is cited in a dispute about the quality of charts round the coast of Scotland, in which Murdoch Mackenzie was refuting the criticisms of the agriculturalist, James Anderson.80 Mackenzie lamented that the Great Map had not been published, but publication would have been no easy matter, as by that time the simple technical specification that had produced the ‘military sketch’ had been completely superseded by trigonometry. Nevertheless, William thought that the information might be salvaged by ‘extending the great triangles quite to the northern extremity of the island, and filling them in from the original map. Thus that imperfect work [The Military Survey] would have been effectively completed, and the nation would have reaped the benefit of what had already been done, as a very moderate extra-expense.’81 The minimal and fragile budget of the Military Survey had caused its specification to be quite inadequate and there did not even seem to be any coherent plan for its reduction and distribution within the army. The most surprising omission is that there is no record of any accompanying memoir,82 a text that would have been an important statement about contemporary Scotland. It would, for instance, have furnished the original intent by summarising some of the most advantageous locations for garrisons, and the tactical strengths and weaknesses of particular routes through the Highlands. Such a document would have been very much in line with William’s own instructions on reconnoitring (Appendix 2). Had Mackenzie pursued the publication of the Map, he would have found that there were considerable differences between the accuracy and the detailed depiction of the protracted copy, on the one hand, and the painterly aesthetics of the Fair Copy on the other. In the latter,

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complexities tend to be smoothed away, even though the overall aim of documenting the perviousness of the Highlands was achieved. Thus, for instance, settlement locations are trustworthy83 but the detail within them is only generalised; the extent of cultivated ground is treated at a summary level because anything more would have had little military value; and the quality of the placenames that are given is extremely variable. These variations have not stopped historical geographers from trying to use the map as a source for data about the landscape of Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century, before so much of it was altered by agricultural improvement and industrialisation.84 However, the Survey was the work of many hands, and the specification was a military one, not social or economic. Whilst it is of exceptional value for the information that it contains, this must be quantified and analysed with caution; to obtain a rounded picture, the protracted and the Fair Copy of any one area must be used together by the historical geographer, many of whom will agree with the conclusion85 that it is ‘one of the most intriguing and at the same time infuriating documents available to the researcher into Scotland’s past landscapes’. Nevertheless, its coverage and accuracy were unprecedented, partly because it did not rely on earlier work; it was also beautiful and, in a wider cultural perspective, it was indicative of everything that was happening in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland. ‘As an expression of the art and science of Enlightenment map making, it is an indisputably magnificent achievement.’86 What William had done, led by David Watson, was indeed extraordinary, although, ironically, it was the weaknesses in the Military Survey  – its lack of information on elevation, and the absence of a robust trigonometrical framework – that would determine William’s preoccupations in the second half of his career. For now, however, the frustrations around its inadequacy could give way to some sense of achievement, especially as, for him personally, it had been an exceedingly difficult time. At Christmas 1748, just as the Survey was really getting underway, his father, John Roy, had died. He was fifty-one. At that time of the year William would have been in Edinburgh and it is possible that he may have been able to get back to Carluke for the funeral. The family paid £4 to the Kirk Session for the mortcloth, probably the one that John himself had gone to Glasgow to collect six years before. The pain of loss was compounded by the total disruption of family life. In his Will, John Roy was described as ‘tennant in Overshielhills … factor to Sir William [Gordon] upon his Lands and Estate at Milntown.’ As a tenant, when John died his dependents lost the roof over their heads (Figure 1.1). William had left home, and his younger brother, James,



The Map-maker 59

supported by the Countess of Forfar’s bursary, was in Glasgow, pursuing a final course in theological studies after graduating MA from the university a year earlier; so it was Mary Roy, and her youngest child, Susannah, who now left the village and moved to Lanark.87 The ties to Carluke were loosening, and the family was splitting up. Events were now to take William away from Scotland, and although he would make frequent visits over the next thirty years he would never live there again.

NOTES   1. The inclusion of ‘William Roy, from Lanerk’ in a list of prisoners taken after Culloden led to a suggestion that William Roy from Carluke might have been a Jacobite. However, his background, Watson’s choice of him a year later to lead a sensitive military project, and all of his subsequent career, make such an idea utterly implausible. It was a common name; the age of the man listed was given as twenty-three or twenty-four (rather than twenty), and the Willaim [sic] Roy subsequently imprisoned in the Jane of Alloway at Tilbury was illiterate. See Seton and Arnot 1929, 292–3, and Hewitt 2010, 323, n17.   2. For the course and context of Jacobitism, see Szechi 2019.   3. For an overview of the military roads, see Taylor 1996, and for the barracks, Tabraham and Grove 1995.   4. Chalmers 1888, 60–1n.  5. A Description of the Highlands of Scotland … : NLS Acc.11104 (Map RoI. a42); Moir 1973, 183.   6. NLS EMS.s.16.   7. DNB (E. Baigent 2004); Hewitt 2010, 1–2, 5, 7–13, 319–21; 2012, 63–5.   8. Roy 1785, 385–7.   9. Allardyce 1896, 509–12. 10. Hodson 2007, 9–10, 23. 11. ‘Account of money expended by Major General Watson’, TNA T1/486 f. 2. Hewitt 2010, 33–4; Hewitt 2012, 68, 76. 12. Anderson 2009b. 13. ‘Memorandum respecting the Map of Scotland, Jany 12 1806, given  to Arrowsmith’ [by David Dundas], NRS RH1/2/523. Gardiner 1737, 90–107. 14. The standard Gunter’s chain was 66 feet (20.11 metres) long but chains of 50 and 100 feet were also made (Millburn 1988, 273); this accords with David Dundas’s hesitant memory that the chains used in the Survey were 45 or 50 feet long: NRS RH1/2/523. 15. NRS RH1/2/523. 16. HC4, 1105–8 (S. Blond). 17. Konvitz 1987, 10, 12–18; HC4, 239–44 (M. Pelletier). 18. Roy 1785, 386–7.

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19. The bibliography of the Military Survey of Scotland is very extensive. The principal items (which contain appropriate references) include: O’Donoghue 1977; Hodson 2007; Tabraham 2007; Withers 2007; Anderson 2009a; Hewitt 2010; 2012; Christian 1989; Whittington and Gibson 1986. Aspects of the cartography of the map are treated in Mallett 1987. For the map itself, see Roy 2007, and online from the National Library of Scotland: http://maps.nls.uk/roy/. 20. NRS RH1/2/523; repeated by Arrowsmith 1807, 7. 21. The timescales are altogether uncertain. Chalmers (1888, vi) quotes from letters from William Skinner, the Chief Engineer in Scotland, which imply that the Survey proper did not start until early June 1748, but this is a misunderstanding. 22. Christian 1989, 103–19. 23. NRAS 234, Bundle 683, quoted by Hewitt 2010, 20, 324. 24. K.Top.L.44-1; Hodson 2007, 13. 25. NRS RH1/2/523. 26. BL K.Top.50.83-2. Although based on Sandby’s field experience, it may be a composite, commemorative image rather than en plein air documentation: Bonehill and Daniels 2017. Compare also an oval etching, dated 1750, in the British Library (K.Top.62.i.17), and a pencil and wash drawing added to a grangerised version of Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Scotland 1769, vol. 1 pt 1, p. 106/6, now in the National Library of Wales (ID 99741917702419). 27. HC4, 678–9, 682–5 (D. J. Warner), 1423 (M. L. Sturani). 28. George Adams, another London instrument-maker, whose father (also George) supplied the Board of Ordnance from 1748 to 1772, and King George III (Millburn 2000), illustrated a smaller circumferentor – a compass with only two vanes – of ‘a kind that was much used by General Roy for delineating the smaller parts of a survey’. It is more likely that William used this pocket instrument for the plans of earthworks rather than for more extensive surveys. Adams 1791, 220, 296. 29. Adams 1791, pl. 14, fig. 2. 30. An example by Cole is in the History of Science Museum, in Oxford: inventory no. 52413. 31. Some heights were recorded (David Dundas to Arrowsmith, NRS RH1/2/523), but Arrowsmith (1807, 8), relying on the fading memory of David Dundas, inferred that the team did not have instruments equipped with telescopes. 32. Taylor 1996. 33. Lochée 1778, 1–5. 34. Quoted by Alexander 1877, 85–6. 35. Curtis 1980, 475–80; Haldane 1962, 6n. 36. DNB (R. B. Sher 2004). 37. Tabraham 2007, 27.



The Map-maker 61

38. Arrowsmith 1807, 7. 39. Anderson 2013, 136–8; Medynska-Gulij and Zuchowski 2018a, 2018b. 40. Arrowsmith 1807, 11–13. He used information that William had later provided when he published his survey of the Antonine Wall, stretching across central Scotland (Roy 1793, pl. xxxv), but the original scale was cited on the reduction of The King’s Road, reproduced on the cover of this book. 41. Chalmers 1888, 61n. The four Engineers in Scotland were George Morrison, James Bramham, Harry Gordon and John Archer, ‘who accomplished their [specific] surveys of the military roads and military posts in 1749’ and 1750 (Porter 1889, 165). 42. BL Add MSS 17499 f. 72; TNA WO 47/35 ff. 233–4, 241–2. 43. The evidence of David Dundas to Arrowsmith: NRS RH1/2/523. 44. NRS RH1/2/523. 45. Roy 1793, 59. 46. Logan Mack 1926, 42–63. 47. DNB (P. E. Kopperman 2008); Porter 1889, 161, 163; Lawson 1966, 194–200. The surname Debbieg, in various spellings, was commonest in Norfolk in the eighteenth century. 48. Porter 1889, 173, 181, 186, 188, 195–7; NRS RH1/2/523. For the shipwreck of ‘The Countess of Leicester’, see Calendar of Home Office Papers (George III): 1760–65, no. 2123, pp. 317–26: Ordnance Entry Book 1760–76. He has been confused with a mining surveyor of the same name who was born in Montgomeryshire and who worked for the Commission for the Annexed Estates in the 1760s and 1770s (Torrens 1996; DNB (H. S. Torrens 2004)). The John Williams of the Military Survey was at Woolwich when his namesake was working in the mines of Mid Wales. 49. Hewitt 2010, 68, 70, 76. TNA MR 1/925: Plan of Portsea Lak[e] shewing the situation of the Batteries and Line erected for the defence of that Pass, 1756, surveyed by William Dundas but drawn by Daniel Slack; Hodson 1978, 102–3. Army List 1775, 13, 123. Porter 1889, 172, 181, 188. 50. DNB (D. Chandler 2004); the portraits by Sandby are held by The Royal Collections Trust (RCIN 914416, 914513, and probably 914448; it is possible that Sandby reused figures drawn in Scotland and transposed them to Windsor); Oppé 1947, 62, 67, 74, 77, 83. No trace has been found of the ‘Mr Hervey on the survey, Scotland’ substituted for Howes in a catalogue of 1934; it was probably a copying error. There is an inconsistency in Dundas’s account (NRS RH1/2/523) as he reported to Arrowsmith that Howes (the spelling varies) ‘died [a] Clergyman’, even though Howes did not die until seven years after their exchange. Dundas probably knew that Howes had become a clergyman but that they had lost touch thereafter. There may, conceivably, have been a Norfolk connection between Howes and Debbieg that led Howes to join the Survey. 51. Porter 1889, 166, 168, 173, 181; Marshall 1980, 37; The London Magazine or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, 26 (June 1757), 309.

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52. Bonehill and Daniels 2009, 98–9; 2017. 53. Christian 1990, 20. 54. Christian 1989, 87–91. 55. In 1752–3 the brothers lived in 38 Great Pulteney Street. In 1766 Paul took over a house in Poland Street from his friend, the architect Sir Paul Chambers (Ramsden 1947, 17–18) and he stayed there until 1772. Later, both of these streets were to be of significance to William. 56. Postle 2009, 32. 57. Bonehill and Skinner 2009. 58. Myrone 2009. 59. Bonehill and Daniels 2009. 60. Marshall 1980, 37; Dictionary of Irish Architects (online); Hodson 2007, 10. 61. Army List 1785. 62. NRS RH1/2/523. 63. Omond 1887, xxxii. 64. DNB (J. A. Houlding 2004). 65. Missing from Royal Archives, Cumberland Papers, Box 44/268, but copied in BL MFR/676 reel 69, box 44, letters 266–90 (1750–2), images 268–268a. For the first page, O’Donoghue 1977, 17. 66. There is no indication as to how exactly the survey of the coast was tied to the recording (by others) inland, nor how the inevitable misclosures were resolved. 67. Roy 1793, 59. 68. TNA WO 30/115B. General Roy’s Instructions on Reconnoitring were printed by A. B. King (His Majesty’s Stationer in Ireland), sometime between 1781 and 1790: NLS 46.1.5, and reprinted here as Appendix 2. Surprisingly, there are no specific mentions of the coast. 69. Birley 1953, 14–18; Macdonald 1917, 167–8; Hodson 2011, 120. 70. The original protraction, the Fair Copy of the Highlands, and the reductions are all in the King’s Topographical Collection in the British Library: K.Top.48.25-1.a–f. 71. TNA WO 26/21 p. 364. 72. John Watson’s claim: NRS RH1/2/511. 73. Hewitt 2012, 68–9; NRAS 3246, Bundle 89; TNA T1/486. f. 2. 74. Caledonian Mercury, 24 January 1785; NRS RH1/2/523. 75. Hodson 1988. 76. Commissioners for the Annexed Estates Letter Books 1755–61, NRS E726/1/1-2. In a later form, they were reissued by the Duke of Richmond in 1785; they are reproduced in Seymour 1980, 363–5. 77. It was probably for marketing purposes that Aaron Arrowsmith made so much of his ‘discovery’ of the Military Survey of Scotland while he was preparing his own map of the country in 1807. 78. David Dundas’s evidence to Aaron Arrowsmith: NRS RH1/2/523.



The Map-maker 63

79. Caledonian Mercury, 27 July 1778. For Ainslie, see Withers 2002, 64–8. 80. Caledonian Mercury, 24 January 1785; Mackenzie 1785, 6, 23–4, 27. William seems to have shown the results of the Military Survey to Thomas Pennant, along with his reduction, the Mappa Britanniae Septentrionalis, although this was not to appear before the publication of the Military Antiquities in 1793: Walters 1976, 123–4, 126. 81. Roy 1785, 387. 82. cf. HC4, 933–6 (C. Bousquet-Bressolier). 83. For comments on the positional accuracy of the Survey, see Fleet and Kowal 2007, 201. 84. E.g. O’Dell 1953. Whittington and Gibson (1986, 10) commented on ‘a seemingly inordinate emphasis placed upon the houses and grounds of the great families of Scotland, most of which have been surveyed very carefully indeed’. In the Lowlands this may come over simply as obsequious deference, but in the Highlands it was a different matter: if the pattern of Jacobite recruitment in 1745 was ever repeated, these seats of the nobility (the clan chiefs) might be centres of future fighting, and so they warranted particular attention. 85. Whittington and Gibson 1986, 61. 86. Withers 2007, 45. 87. OPR 629 000 0020 0220Z. Overshielhills is now Upper Shielhills, to the east of Miltonhead, just over the Jock’s Burn from Kirkton. NRS Register of Testaments CC 14/5/17/467-72.

3 The Military Engineer: Raids, Resources and Fortifications

AN ENGINEER IN ENGLAND AND RAIDS ACROSS THE CHANNEL

I

n 1755, two days before Christmas, Sir John Ligonier, the Lieutenant General of the Ordnance, signed an elongated piece of paper1 by which William was appointed a Practitioner Engineer. The standard wording contained William’s orders and set his objectives: ‘You are therefore to improve yourself in the study of the mathematicks, fortifications and other sciences which may render you capable to serve as an Engineer upon any occasion … .’ William, about fifteen years out of school, and after eight years in the Military Survey, was well advanced in these things, even though he had received no formal training of the kind that had been available to his contemporaries through the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich or in the Drawing Room in the Tower of London. A month later he received a second appointment, as a Lieutenant in the 53rd Regiment of Foot, Colonel Napier’s, which was then designated to have its headquarters in Exeter.2 He had finally joined the British Army. However, the Engineers were in some ways a race apart. When William was appointed, they still held warrants which did not necessarily entail or equate to any particular rank in the regular army; they had their own hierarchy, in which the Practitioner was the lowest rung. In addition, contrary to the prevailing practice of personal advancement in the army by the purchase of commissions, it was recognised that the Engineers had a technical expertise that could not simply be bought; they were an elite group. In this winter of 1755–6, George III had just sanctioned an increase in the establishment from twenty-nine to thirtyseven, and by 1759 it was to grow further in order to meet the needs of the forces overseas. The Practitioners were distributed through the



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garrisons so that they could acquire a general military education beyond their specialist subjects.3 The growth in the numbers of Engineers was largely due to the buildup to the Seven Years War. In North America there had been jostling between the British communities on the east coast and the French to the west. Large numbers of settlers and land hunger on the eastern seaboard, together with burgeoning Atlantic trade, had produced considerable strains. In the summer of 1754, the tension had flared up into ambushes and attacks on the forts that each side had constructed. Despite the inordinate length of the supply lines, both countries, keen to defend their interests, sent over troops, and in the summer and autumn of 1755 the situation had deteriorated further. In Europe, the Treaty of Aix-laChapelle, signed at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, had provided a respite but had only postponed another round of conflict. The continent remained nervous. In the first Treaty of Versailles, in 1756, Austria and France signed a pact of mutual assistance and, that April, in a move intended to put pressure on Britain to sue for peace in America, France landed a large force on Minorca. In August, Frederick of Prussia, Britain’s ally, launched an offensive. In this context the long southern coast of England was open to French invasion or raiding. Although William’s new regiment, now renumbered as the 51st, had been raised in Leeds, it swiftly moved its operations southwards. In April it had marched to York where it was billeted on the citizens; in August it was stationed at Portchester, and in September at Fareham.4 Meanwhile, David Watson and William, and probably both Dundases, were off in quite another direction. Their brief was the defence of the realm: to assess the preparedness of the nation for invasion by making military reconnaissance ‘throughout such parts of the country as seemed most open to attack’. An early task, in February 1756, played to one of William’s strengths: the mapping of the coastline. They undertook a rapid analytical survey of the great natural harbour of Milford Haven in south-west Wales, recording on the way there (as was their habit) ‘the country from Gloucester to Pembroke’ and including a report ‘on the state of the roads and passes’. They produced a coloured plan of the whole of the Haven, at a scale of 1,000 yards to the inch – the same scale as that of the Military Survey of Scotland – right up to Haverfordwest and Canaston Bridge.5 In April, William seems to have been busy drawing up a map and a table to show the route through Hampshire, Wiltshire and Sussex of the eight Hessian battalions that the Duke of Cumberland had drafted in to strengthen his army. The table contains the information that was central to the logistical planning

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that characterised so much of the work of the Engineers: where each battalion was to disembark; the routes that they were to march; the time (in days) that it would take them; the location of each camp; and the overflow areas to be used for quartering, should this become necessary.6 These topics were to occupy William for much of the rest of his career. In May, Watson was appointed Quartermaster General of the Forces in Scotland, a more sedentary role that would have curtailed some of his time for the reconnaissance of the invasion coast. Nevertheless, the team was active in the southern counties during this first year: William Dundas surveyed the defences of Portsea Lake, immediately to the north of Portsmouth7 and close to the bases at Portchester and Fareham. At around this time, in between bouts of reconnaissance, William Roy was doing the sort of routine work that was part of the training of every Engineer, including copying Bastide’s plan of the harbour and fortifications of Louisbourg, in Nova Scotia, which had been surveyed in 1745. (General Amherst retook the town in 1758, and the preparations for this operation may have been the stimulus to produce a new copy.) Of more immediate concern, the outbreak of the Seven Years War stimulated the reconstruction of the dockyard at Portsmouth and several options will have been considered for the renewed defence of the docks. It may have been at this point that William produced a plan, sections and profiles of a design for new fortifications. His drawings of the bastions, redoubts, a covered way and the glacis are exquisite: fine ink outlines, combined with carefully controlled watercolour washes that differentiated the angles in the profiles and rendered them three-dimensional.8 He had clearly benefited from his time with Paul Sandby. It is not known whether any of his plans were taken forward. Later in the season, or perhaps into the very beginning of 1757, David Dundas mapped the coast from Portland to Southampton, and William (at a much larger scale) tackled the shores from Christchurch to Dover, and then the coast of Kent, from Whitstable right round to Romney Marsh. Inland, they also surveyed the roads that might be of strategic importance for the movement of troops (Figure 3.1), including those between Southampton, Guildford and Croydon, from Portsmouth to Brighton and Hastings, and from Whitstable to Canterbury. It is also clear, from a report that William compiled some years later, that he travelled through all of the Home Counties around London during 1756 and 1757, assessing the tactical positions (Figure 3.5) offered by the natural landscape.9 For men now so attuned to landscape, the rolling chalk downland, the beechwoods and the water-meadows must have been an unfamiliar world. They had to get to know it quickly, and to do so there



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Figure 3.1  Part of William’s survey of the strategically important road from Guildford to Chichester. © The British Library Board, K.Top.6.108

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was no better way than by the close scrutiny that mapping demanded. And William, standing on the cliffs of Kent that would one day become so important to him, will have caught his first glimpse of the coast of France: a soft grey line across a grey sea. He would soon go there. Setbacks in the Seven Years War, including the defeat of Cumberland at Hastenbeck in July 1757, led Frederick, King of Prussia, to advocate a diversionary British raid on the French coast, a move that was strongly supported by William Pitt, the Secretary of State for the Southern Department. Despite the misgivings among some senior officers, the choice of target fell on the naval base at Rochefort, close to the mouth of the Charente in the Bay of Biscay. This decision stemmed from a report made by a relatively junior Engineer, Robert Clerk, who in 1754 had brazenly visited Rochefort, in uniform, and had asked to be shown around the town and its dockyards. His subsequent advice, accepted by a Cabinet committee, was that the docks were lightly defended and vulnerable to attack. As a result, a force of thirty-one warships and forty-nine transports, carrying ten battalions under the command of Sir John Mordaunt, left Spithead in early September with instructions to take Rochefort if at all possible. In a meteoric promotion, Clerk had been made a Lieutenant Colonel and joined the expedition as the Chief Engineer. There were six other Engineers, William among them. The Île-d’Aix, at the mouth of the Charente, was soon captured but problems immediately arose: the artillery was to have been landed in the bay at Châtelaillon, to the north, but neither Clerk’s report nor those officers in London who had planned the raid had anticipated the shallowness of the water which prevented the fleet coming closer to the shore than about a mile and a half. Indecision, frustration, fears about the strengthening of the town’s defences, and contrary winds all occasioned long delays; the element of surprise had been utterly lost. Ten days after it arrived, the fleet sailed back to Britain. It was a classic example of the failure of adequate reconnaissance and intelligence. Less than three months later, in the dauntingly formal surroundings of the Council Chamber in Whitehall, Sir John Mordaunt faced a court martial for the disastrous outcome of the expedition. A central concern was around the strength of the defences of the town. One of the questions posed to Lieutenant Colonel Clerk, as an Engineer, was whether, if he had been in Rochefort and he had had ten days’ notice of an attack, he could have put in sufficient additional defences? Clerk dodged the question, and he was not pressed on the point, but Sir John Mordaunt, in his evidence, said that ‘the enemy in two or three days’ time might easily have raised an entrenchment in that low marshy soil, that would



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be a sufficient defence against a coup de main’. In these circumstances the prosecution was bound to call for a specialist opinion from one of the other Engineers present: it turned out to be William. He was asked, under oath, how long would it take (given that he had as many workmen as he wished) to throw up ‘a work of 300 yards, so as to make [the town] defensible against any sudden assault?’ William said that there were several variables to consider but that in any ordinary soil, so small an extent of entrenchment as 60, 100, or 300 yards might be thrown up, and in the space of two or three days made so strong, as to render it unassailable, till such time as it was battered and laid open by cannon, and … even a covered way, glacis, and perhaps an advanced ditch might be made.

So William’s informed opinion supported Sir John’s argument. He was also asked whether the expedition’s artillery was sufficient to oppose the cannon of a fortified town. He imagined that it was not, as he thought that they only had twelve ‘battering cannon’ (12-pounders and 24-pounders).10 Sir John was eventually acquitted on the grounds that his orders had left him some room for judgement as to whether an attack should be pressed, but the expedition had been expensive and humiliating; the King was displeased. There remains for us a puzzle. Apart from Clerk and William, there were five other Engineers in the force who went to Rochefort. Why was William chosen to be the expert witness? He was not the most senior, as there were two Sub-Engineers on the strength, but perhaps, at thirty-one, he was thought to have the maturity to cope with the personalities involved and with the intimidating venue of the court. His superiors were evidently confident in his knowledge, which was now clearly greatly expanded from simple cartography. He had been able to offer convincing responses to the key questions, and he had corroborated the evidence of his commander, so there was no threat to him, quite the reverse. Despite the utter failure at Rochefort, Pitt’s enthusiasm for diversionary raids on the French coast had not been extinguished. In the early June of 1758 William was again at sea, within an even bigger flotilla carrying 13,000 men, under the command of the Duke of Marlborough, tasked with an attack on the French coast that would coincide with an advance across the Rhine by Ferdinand of Brunswick. This time the target was the fortified town of Saint-Malo in northern Normandy. Once again, wind conditions and a lack of good reconnaissance (at sea and ashore) meant that plans had to be substantially revised. The

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country between the landing grounds at Cancale and Saint-Malo was found to be almost impassable for the heavy equipment, so the idea of taking Saint-Malo itself was dropped and attention turned to SaintServan, immediately to the south, where more than 100 ships were destroyed. The troops re-embarked and, after some frustrating sailing back and forth in the Channel, and the abandonment of a projected march to Caen (because the bay was again found to be too shallow), the fleet eventually hove to off Cherbourg, just beyond the range of the French artillery. The initial intention was to attack the battery to the west of the town, but high winds for two days made this impossible. With the stores running low, especially the forage for the horses, any further action was given up. William, however, had spent the time usefully, in espionage. The fleet had stood about a mile off the coast, a safe distance but still close enough in to distinguish all of the features of interest to the soldier’s eye. He recorded the positions of the coastal batteries, forts and signal towers around Cherbourg, the strength and identity of the forces that he could see on the shore, the number of ships in the inner basins of the port and the character of the hinterland. It was valuable information. Once back in Portsmouth he wrote a report to Colonel Napier, his former commanding officer, who was at the centre of military intelligence, enclosing a detailed sketch-map (Figure 3.2) and apologising (as always) that it was less than perfect. He also provided panoramic drawn profiles of the coast on either side of Cherbourg, and of the whole northern coast of the peninsula from Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue to Cap de la Hague. Even though William was still a very junior officer he instinctively knew how to serve his masters and – consciously or not – to further his career. He ended his letter by thanking Napier, whose protégé he seems to have been, ‘for the many favours I have received’.11 IN GERMANY

In the system of patronage that prevailed within the army, and in society as a whole, the development and maintenance of a personal profile was important. Thus, early in 1759, when Lord Ligonier had a scheme to raise a regiment of light horse for anti-invasion duties, he seems to have selected William for a commission because of his reputation as a draughtsman: a core task would be ‘to describe the several parts of the country, to take sketches of posts, camps, etc.’.12 William’s particular talents had clearly been recognised and his profile was rising. As it turned out, however, the scheme came to nought and William spent the

Figure 3.2  The port of Cherbourg and its defences, drawn by William from the deck of The Essex, 21 June 1758, along with three profiles of the adjacent coast. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021. RCIN 732066.a

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summer with the 51st (now Brudenell’s) in Germany. He had first been there the year before when, as an Engineer and Assistant Quartermaster General, his role had been to erect wharves for the disembarkation of 20,000 troops at Bremerhaven, and to arrange their quartering through the territory of the States General. In 1759 the allied forces were under the command of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, to whom had been entrusted the defence of Hanover, so the theatre of war for the 51st was mainly in eastern Westphalia and northern Hesse. In July, after some skirmishing, and several reverses, the town of Minden, not far to the west of Hanover, was lost to the French. As a result, on 1 August the two armies faced each other on the west bank of the Weser, to the north of Minden, and an artillery battle began. An attack by Ferdinand’s infantry on the centre of the French lines was met by a cavalry charge which was repulsed. This should have allowed Ferdinand’s cavalry, under Lord George Sackville, to take the French centre, but the orders that Sackville received were less than clear, and he hesitated, with dire consequences.13 Even so, other advances forced the French to retreat into Minden, and then farther south, to Marburg and then almost to Frankfurt. Hanover was safe for another year. During the battle, William was with the 51st, alongside his friend Robert Bisset, a Scot from near Dunkeld, who was Assistant Quartermaster General to Lord George Sackville.14 Robert had asked his superior if he might be allowed to join the action, and he and William rode though the battlefield, coming quite close to the enemy lines. This mobility meant that Bisset was later able – at Sackville’s court martial – to describe the landscape, the positions of the allied troops and the receipt of orders by Sackville; it also enabled William to compile his impressively detailed plan of the engagement (Figure 3.3). This, which he presented at a scale of approximately 1:29,900, was accompanied on the same sheet by a textual description of the action on the day and by an elaborate triumphal cartouche.15 It was a fine example of a battle plan: celebrating the victory, justifying the actions of the commanders and documenting the engagement for training purposes.16 The story behind William’s plan was later described by James Callander of Craigforth, who at the time had been a thirteen-year-old Ensign with the 51st: As this was the first great battle in the gaining of which the English had participated, his Serene Highness, the Commander-in-chief [Prince Ferdinand], was pleased to require that plans of it should be presented to him by the various engineers in the army, in addition to those which were furnished



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Figure 3.3  A detail of William’s acclaimed plan of the Battle of Minden (Thonhausen), 1759, on which were pasted curvilinear flaps (one is just visible here) that could be lifted to reveal successive positions of the armies. North is to the lower right. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021. RCIN 732111a

by the gentlemen whose province it was to prepare such returns in their official capacity. Mr Roy was one of those who volunteered his services on this ­occasion, and … [his] design was totally different. As the basis of his plan, he had first a general representation of the field of battle; and as during the day there were three distinct dispositions of the adverse armies, he had formed three separate papers, which were … attached to it, as to convey a much clearer conception of the relative position of the troops, at the three most critical and important periods, then could be afforded by the ordinary methods. The idea, in short, was entirely new; and the Duke was so much pleased with the work, that Mr Roy was soon afterwards attached to his Serene Highness’s personal staff.17

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William had designed three overlapping flaps (or, charmingly, papillons), fixed to the detailed base plan, to depict different stages in the battle. Strictly speaking, it was not an ‘entirely new’ idea, but he probably devised it himself, quite independently.18 Whatever the case, it seems that Prince Ferdinand had never seen such a thing before and he sent William 200 gold ducats as a reward, and the Adjutant General, Reden, wrote specifically to send William the Prince’s compliments and thanks. With this success, William now advanced rapidly: he had recently been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant in the Engineers, alongside David Dundas, but it did not stop there. William was appointed as a Captain of Engineers, and he was congratulated ‘… on this extraordinary ­promotion … that you have acquired by your own personal merit’.19 Further, after Minden he had gained a Captaincy in a new infantry unit, a Corps of Highlanders which was to be commanded by Major Robert Murray Keith. Four years younger than William, Keith had been born and educated in Edinburgh and had inherited an estate in Peeblesshire before joining the Scots Brigade. The Highlanders that he led saw a great deal of active service under Ferdinand, playing an important role in seven significant engagements in Germany between January 1760 and the autumn of 1762, when the preliminaries for peace began. During the winter of 1759–60, William was apparently away from the centre of operations for a time (possibly back in Britain, but more probably supervising stores in Bremerhaven) but he had distinguished himself in some unknown way during the siege of Münster, for which Ferdinand, through Reden, sent his congratulations, commending William on his zeal, assiduity and skills; he also sent him 1,200 German florins.20 During his time in Germany, William’s roles varied from securing the provision of food for the men21 to collecting the material for surveys and accounts of encampments and of troop movements. One of these is a ‘Plan showing the encampments and movements of His Majesty’s army in Germany’22 between July and September 1760 in the broken, wooded country between Kassel and Warburg. It is a magnificent map, especially in the treatment of the topography, covering an area more than 35 miles square. It is signed by William, who again used flaps to show variations in location, and was probably based on a contemporary printed map to which he had added considerable augmentation. The map is accompanied by an immaculate manuscript journal of the movements of Ferdinand’s army, written by William, to explain what is depicted. This journal includes the orders of march and details of the routes taken; it is, in effect, a detailed historical account. It sets out



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which regiments and units were engaged, and where, and is thus an exposition of the tactics employed. It recounts, day by day, the serious skirmishes that took place, with significant casualties on both sides, and it is a professional, dispassionate account which must have drawn upon the experience of many colleagues. However, it is noteworthy that in the description of the events of 5 and 6 September the objectivity slips, and the focus intensifies, in what seems to be a first-hand account of a night attack on the little town of Zierenberg, to the north-west of Kassel, in Hesse. Intelligence had been received that the enemy had 2,000 men there, so the assault was led by the British Grenadiers and by Kingsley’s regiment, supported by 150 of the Highlanders – of whom, presumably, William was one. The surprise was complete, and there was hand-tohand fighting in the streets and houses; about 300 of the enemy were killed and over 400 prisoners taken. Two amusettes (light field cannon) were captured along with ‘a great deal of booty. Our loss was only one man killed and a few wounded.’23 There were at the time few maps in Germany that showed topographical information,24 let alone any that would have had tactical utility. To remedy this, William applied an extraordinary level of augmentation to simple base maps, as is shown by the plan and account of another engagement in which the Highlanders were involved: the expedition to Einbeck, to the south of Hanover (Figure 3.4). This took place in the snow, fog and rain of November 1761, when Ferdinand managed to dislodge the French from their base in the town. Whereas most of the map that William made of the environs of Einbeck is an almost cheerful riot of long ridges, sinuous valleys and finger-like hills, the north-eastern portion of the sheet, showing the country between Hildersheim and Alfeld, was ‘only inscribed from the common map’ and is a bland and uninformative two-dimensional landscape, devoid of any detail except for rivers, roads and a single symbol for each major settlement. Just like the maps of Scotland before the Military Survey, such a desert of depiction would have been of little use to the army.25 The maps that William produced of the operations in Germany were part celebration, part record and part textbook examples of tactics for the education of the next generation of officers. In making these descriptive illustrations of operations in the field, William’s preparatory material must have been very extensive; that this was indeed the case is indicated by the fact that he eventually bequeathed ‘all my manuscript sketch books, orderly books and drawings relative to Prince Ferdinand’s campaigns in Germany’ to David Dundas, ‘he being well qualified to extract something useful from rough materials of that sort’. Indeed

Figure 3.4  William’s map of the allied army’s movements in the expedition to Einbeck in November 1761 illustrates the extent to which he added topographical detail to a simple base map. The less relevant north-eastern quadrant received no such extra detail. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021. RCIN 733040



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he was: David became the great tactician and educator whose work would influence the British army into the nineteenth century. In his seminal exposition, Principles of Military Movements, chiefly applied to Infantry (1788), Dundas expressed a particular acknowledgment ‘… to his friend Major Gen. Roy; and most truly regrets, that one so perfectly acquainted with the scene of operations [in Germany], and possessed of the most ample materials, should never have given to the world a detailed history of that war, the whole of which he served, and is so well enabled to investigate’.26 William’s plan and description of the Battle of Minden (or Thonhausen), paid for by Ferdinand, was printed and published in London by Thomas Major, and was exorbitantly priced at half a guinea, coloured, or seven shillings, plain. It came out at the end of February 1760, at the start of the court martial of Lord George Sackville, which took place in the Horse Guards. Sackville was accused of disobeying Ferdinand’s order at Minden that his cavalry should immediately support the advance of the infantry regiments that had just repulsed the attacks by the French in the centre. William was not called to give evidence but his companion on the day, Robert Bisset, Sackville’s Assistant Quartermaster General, was called several times. In the urgency and noise of battle, orders could be difficult to give or to receive, and in the aftermath there would be conflicting memories of what exactly had occurred. In his defence, Sackville said that doubts had arisen as to whether the infantry battalions behind which he had halted was indeed the infantry that he had been ordered by the Prince to support. William’s plan – ‘so much relied on’ in the trial – had been able to clarify for the court which infantry units the General had actually ridden up to, and the plan was referred to in the evidence of two other witnesses. At the end of one of the highest-profile trials of the day, Sackville was found guilty of having disobeyed Ferdinand’s orders and  was ‘adjudged unfit to serve His Majesty in any military capacity whatsoever’ – although in an extraordinary renaissance he was to later reappear in a different guise as the Secretary of State for the American colonies.27 THE QUARTERMASTER

Busy in Germany, William will have missed any opportunity of seeing David Watson in his last illness. Suffering from gout and gallstones, Watson died in October 1761; among his many detailed bequests (including those to his namesake, his natural son) he left his mathematical instruments to William, and David Dundas was given half of his

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‘horse furniture’. While others fell away, William continued to rise: a month later, he was appointed as Deputy Quartermaster General to the forces in South Britain, taking the rank of Major.28 Despite that, he may have remained in Germany; he certainly returned there the following year when the arrangements for the end of the war were being made. The preliminary peace agreement between Britain and France was signed at Fontainebleau on 3 November 1762, and the Treaty of Paris followed on 10 February 1763. In the summer of 1762 William had been made a Lieutenant Colonel of foot in the army,29 and his role as a Quartermaster became increasingly senior, diplomatic and strategic, underlining how the Engineers had to work at all sorts of scales in the course of their careers. It was less than five years earlier, as an Assistant Quartermaster, that William had been busy producing designs for the framing, windlasses and water troughs of the wells for the army’s camp at Amersham, to the north-west of London: plans, elevations and location maplets had been rendered in crisp ink and beautifully shaded watercolour, with labels in his distinctive immaculate lettering.30 Now he was dealing with the wholesale evacuation of an army. In a letter dated 26 November 1762, as the peace process gained pace, the Earl of Halifax had written formally to the Marquis of Granby, the Commander-in-Chief, about the immediate return of the British forces: It is the King’s pleasure that the British troops should return home as soon as possible, and as Sir Joseph Yorke has the King’s orders to ask the consent of the States General to their passing thro the territory of their High Mightinesses in order to their embarkment at Wilhemstadt, where transport will be ready to receive them on board, His Majesty would have  General  Sandford and  Col. Roy dispatched immediately to The Hague, with instructions to regulate with the Ministers of the States, in concert with His Excellency, everything that concerns their march route, ­provisions, etc.31

Twenty years later William described (in the third person) the role that he had played: He was employed to erect stages and wharfs for the disembarkation of the British troops at Bremerlehe; he contracted for the materials, and the labour; he paid such current and contingent expenses as were necessary [and] he certified the expences to the Commander in Chief … He was commissioned, together with Major General Sandford and Lieutenant Colonel Keith, to conduct the British troops through Holland in their way home: he acted in the Quarter Master General’s Department. The price paid for the



The Military Engineer 79 quarters of the troops, and for the necessary carriages, was settled with the States General, by a tariff; the bread and forage was supplied by particular contracts, in the usual way … The number of these troops was about twenty thousand. From the time they entered to the time they left the territories of the States General, was about thirty days; and the total expense under thirty thousand pounds … [He acted] as a check and control, to see that the articles supplied were good of their kind, adequate to the services they were intended for, and that there was no waste.32

The detailed management of troop movements, the logistics around the establishment of permanent quarters for the men, and the location and design of temporary encampments had all become major preoccupations. Thus, for instance, on 24 February 1763, William wrote to another senior officer, from Willemstad: Lord Pembroke desired me to acquaint you that Bland’s Regiment [the 36th Foot] will be all embarked so early tomorrow as to admit easily of getting one Troop of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards on board, which will make the work easier next day. His Lordship therefore thinks that one Troop may be ordered to march so as to arrive at this place about 12 o’clock. The other five Troops may be ordered to march on the 26th so as that the first two Troops arrive here at 5 in the morning, the next two at 8, and the 5th at 10.33

Such juggling requires a clear analytical and practical approach, something at which William excelled. In designing the most efficient movement of troops, each Quartermaster needed good-quality maps and, as he returned to Britain, William’s thoughts returned to the question of how a consistent national cartographic coverage could be achieved at home. The war had stimulated the dissemination of cartographic techniques, through the publications of Dupain de Montesson and others,34 and William was probably particularly conscious of the progress that had been made with the Carte de France: by 1760, fifty of the 180 sheets that the Cassinis had designed to cover the country (at a scale of 1:86,400) were already complete.35 The French had a geodetic framework that could be built upon, yet nothing of the kind was available in Britain; William now floated a scheme for a national cartography which, though less ambitious than he would have wished, might be sufficiently economical to have a chance of being adopted. His ideas are not documented but twenty years later he summarised them from a detached perspective, almost as if he had not been the prime mover: On the conclusion of the peace of 1763, it came for the first time under the consideration of Government, to make a general survey of the whole island

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at the public cost. Towards the execution of this work, whereof the direction was to have been committed to my charge, the map of Scotland was to have been made subservient, by extending the great triangles quite to the northern extremity of the island, and filling them in from the original map. Thus that imperfect work [the Military Survey] would have been effectually completed, and the nation would have reaped the benefit of what had already been done, at a very moderate extra expense.36

There seems to have been some support for the idea, at least from the King who (at about this time, or slightly later) lent William the sheets of the Military Survey so that he could produce a map of Scotland.37 However, the immediate aftermath of a costly war, fought in Europe and in America, was probably not the best time to lobby the government for new expenditure on a national map. The proposal was not taken up, and William had to bide his time. Nevertheless, at the county level within England there were stirrings towards the overall improvement of quality: in 1759 the Society of Arts had offered a prize of £100 for any county map produced at 1 inch:1 mile (a scale that William had used for some of his work in southern England in 1755 and 1757).38 However, no attempt seems to have been made to construct a framework whereby the many individual county surveys might be stitched together into a national whole. William’s return to England meant that he also had an opportunity – the first for several years – to visit his family in Scotland, especially his mother, Mary, who was now probably in her early sixties. He was certainly in Lanark in September 1764 when he will have taken the opportunity to see his brother James, whose career had been advancing steadily. After graduation from the University of Glasgow in 1747, James had gone into the church and was licensed by the Presbytery of Glasgow in 1754. Two years earlier, a chapel of ease for the Barony parish had been built by subscription at Shettleston, then a small rural village about three miles to the east of the city. James was appointed as its first full-time preacher in 1756.39 Less than two years later he moved from this country ministry to the city of Edinburgh, to the ancient parish of St Cuthbert’s. In the Kirk Session, which was clearly impressed, James was elected, by 44 votes to 4, as an assistant minister in October 1757, with an annual stipend of £70; by popular demand, he was ordained the following June. St Cuthbert’s church itself (which probably dated to the sixteenth century) was in a very poor state and needed to be rebuilt. At the same time, the rapid growth in the population of the parish demanded new facilities, so a chapel of ease, with a seating capacity of 1,200 and known as the Buccleuch Chapel, had been opened



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in January 1756 in an outlying part of the parish, at the western end of Crosscauseway. At first the chapel was served from St Cuthbert’s, but this arrangement had proved unsatisfactory and James became its first minister in 1758.40 Such an appointment suggests a high degree of confidence within the Kirk Session that this young man of twenty-seven could shoulder the responsibility for a new congregation. Six years later, there is little doubt that William will have particularly enjoyed going to see James in Edinburgh, a city that he knew so well. But that autumn of 1764 was probably the last time that the brothers saw each other. In 1765, William was thirty-nine, yet he had never had a home of his own. The peripatetic years in the Military Survey of Scotland had been followed by the long spell with the army in Germany. This was typical of a soldier’s life but, even so, he must have wished for an established base. Although he did not stop travelling, the probable trigger for a more settled existence was his move into a ‘staff’ job. At the end of July he was appointed41 ‘… to inspect, survey, and make reports from time to time, of the state of the coasts, and districts of the country adjacent to the coasts of this kingdom, and the islands thereunto belonging’. This task built on the expertise that he had developed in Scotland and was focused on providing assessments of defensive strength or vulnerability, particularly in the face of the threat of invasion. For this he was to receive an allowance of twenty shillings (£1) per day, and provision was made in the budgets for it to be paid every day of the year, a very substantial retainer in the context of the contemporary economy. It was, moreover, to be paid indefinitely, with expenses;42 this will have allowed William considerable confidence in his personal financial planning, and the flexibility to devote himself to other tasks as well. His choice of where to stay may well have been influenced by his former colleague, Paul Sandby, who was living with his brother, Thomas, when the latter took over 23 Great Pulteney Street in 1752.43 Lying in the heart of Soho, just to the east of Golden Square, Great Pulteney Street was favoured at the time by army officers and painters, but was especially notable for its harpsichord- and piano-makers; these included the great firm of John Broadwood which occupied premises there from 1742 until 1904. William moved in in 1765, taking on one of the houses on the ‘better’ western side of the street, within the block that was formed by nos 32 to 35; he was thus a direct neighbour of Broadwood, a Scot, from Oldhamstocks in East Lothian, who took over his fatherin-law’s business in 1771.44 William’s house, three bays wide, had been built shortly after 1720, when the first leases in the street were granted; it had two storeys and a basement, and there were two principal rooms

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on each floor.45 From this comfortable accommodation – a far cry from the summer camps of the Military Survey, ten years earlier – Lieutenant Colonel Roy could enjoy the benefits of living in the capital, and he stayed put until 1779. This was the base from which he carried out his archaeological research, described here in Chapter 5, and much of his scientific activity, which is summarised in Chapter 6. SOUTH-EAST ENGLAND AND IRELAND

Despite the peace secured by the Treaty of Paris, and Britain’s emphatic success in the war, the long confrontation with France was not extinguished, and the old consciousness of England’s vulnerability to invasion persisted. Someone, possibly William himself as the Inspector, thought that it would be wise to summarise the strengths and weaknesses of ‘the invasion coast’ and of its hinterland. During 1765 he compiled A Military Description of the South East Part of England, a long manuscript46 which was based on the ‘slight observations and sketches’ that he had made in 1756 and 1757. He began – in his usual way – by apologising for the shortcomings of his observations: ‘They are no doubt extremely imperfect … they are however such as usually do strike the eyes of military men, in riding over a country.’ He also claimed ‘no geometrical exactness’ for the small-scale map that accompanied the report. Leaving aside these deprecations, the Description provides an insight into William’s strategic and tactical approach to landscape – here focusing on the defences of London – and into his view that military experience in the past could inform contemporary practice. The report has three main sections. In the first, a straightforward descriptive account is given of the hills around the capital – the North and South Downs, and the Chilterns – before moving on, secondly, to point to the principal positions (Figure 3.5) ‘as would seem most proper for an army to occupy, in order to oppose the progress of an enemy that would attempt to penetrate from the coast towards the capital’. The third part contains an historical commentary advancing his thesis ‘that many of the battles fought between the natives and invaders [going back to the Roman period] happened at remarkable passes, where the ground from its situation was naturally strong’. It is therefore the second section that contains the heart of his military analysis, based on the premise that although ‘every measure is to be taken to repulse an enemy in the very moment of landing, to dispute every inch of ground with him … and to attack him as soon as ever it can be done with advantage … we may suppose him pushing on … even to the gates of

Figure 3.5  A detail from the map accompanying William’s Military Description of south-east England, 1765; the tramlines mark the fall-back positions to be occupied for the defence of London. © The British Library Board, K.Top.6.97

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the capital’. All sorts of invasion scenarios, from all directions, were considered, including the need to fall back from initial defensive positions to secondary ones, in order to oppose the advance of the enemy towards London. Throughout The Description he paid particular attention to the permeability of the coast – the specialist subject that he had developed during the Military Survey – in which his expertise must have become well known. In the text he divided the coast from Thanet to Portsmouth into five sections, describing, in turn, the options that might be presented to a defending army within each one. Thus, if a landing was successful between, say, Sandwich and Deal, ‘… the proper place to make the first great stand would seem to be behind the River Stour [immediately to the north-west of Canterbury], along the heights of Baughton Hill, having the right flank [of the defending army] towards Shottenden windmill or Eastwood Park, the center behind Harbledown, and [the] left extending towards the sea near Hearne’. Specific strategic and tactical needs were also addressed. For instance, To preserve the dockyards [at Chatham], to prevent the enemy from getting possession of any part of the mouth of the Medway, to keep them as long at a distance as possible, and to make the risk less in case of coming to a general engagement, it might perhaps be right to endeavour to fortify a position somewhere about Sittingbourne, where the country is narrow, having the right flank appuyed [formed into a defensive line] to the top of the chalk hills and the left to the sea behind Milton Creek.

William also explored less likely scenarios. If the enemy was to approach London from the north, on the Bedford and or Biggleswade roads, the first position would be taken with Hitchin and Baldock in front; and as in this case the enemy is supposed to enter by the gorge of Stevenage, which is the most remarkable in all this range, the smaller intervening heights, at Woolmer’s Green, Welwyn and Lemsford mills, would come next to be disputed. And the second principal position would be taken at Hatfield, the right extending behind the River Lea, and the left towards the River Coln. Hampstead and Highgate Hills, with the right towards Newington, would form the third position.47

Drawing upon his personal experience of England downland, and of the heights of Haarstrang, in Westphalia in 1759, he knew that there were operational factors that had to be applied: although the chalk hills would offer relatively easy access along their ridges, both of the armies of his professional imagination – the invaders and the defenders – would have to take special care that their cavalry was somehow supplied with



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water on these naturally dry downs. Further, as was usual with William, historical comparisons were as valued as geographical ones: the third part of the Description therefore consists of ‘Extracts and remarks relating to the several invasions on this part of Britain’, from Julius Caesar onwards. In some of this it is difficult to disentangle supposition from military probability. Thus, in Caesar’s second campaign, in 54 bc, William asserted (with some justification) that the Britons retired behind the River Stour, where they made their first stand: the very position that he had advocated in the second section of the manuscript, the assessment of contemporary tactics.48 Quod erat demonstrandum. As it turned out, his first task in the field as Inspector of the coasts and hinterlands was not in Britain at all, but in southern Ireland, and if he expected that it would be anything like what he knew in Scotland, Wales or England, he will have been surprised. A month after his appointment he spent about three weeks on horseback, assembling as much information as he could, to provide (with the usual apology) ‘… a general, tho’ imperfect idea of such things as do naturally strike a military stranger, in passing over a considerable extent of country, in a short space of time’. In his report, he gave a general description of the landscape of southern Ireland and commented on a number of topics of military interest: the navigability of rivers; the state of the roads; the character of the towns and harbours, noting their existing fortifications and their potential for defence; the ease of movement for an army; the logistics of supplies; and potential places of military rendezvous.49 The accompanying map,50 which extends from Dublin to Bantry Bay, was simply an enlargement of what was readily available, with sketched additions, especially of the topography. Some of the principal harbours – Cork, Galway, Limerick, Kinsale, Duncannon, along with Athlone – were given special treatment in maplets, but these were rapid sketches, and their depiction was not necessarily to scale. It was not an easy country for an army, which potentially made the record of William’s observations all the more important. Even though he considered that the roads were generally good, the bogs and rocky gullies alongside them would inhibit the normal arrangement of a marching column. The deployment of light dragoons and infantry were recommended in Ireland, ‘… great parts of whose natural surface is not solid enough to carry cavalry of the heavy kind’. Thus, for instance, he wrote that Clare and Galway … are generally level and open countries, yet from considering the [preceding] description of these parts, it will be easily perceived how utterly

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i­ mpossible it would be for cavalry to do much service, on a surface as encumbered with bog, rock, and sharp stones, where it is indeed even impossible for foot people to move but along the high roads.

The Quartermaster in him noted that some of the necessary supplies were less of a problem. ‘With butcher’s meat of all kinds, milk, butter, poultry and potatoes, an army would be very plentifully supplied in Ireland, but meal for bread must be brought from some other quarter, for, till tillage increases, the country affords not sufficient grain, or barely enough, for the home consumption.’ ‘Grass, it is true, there is enough …’, but the scarcity of hay and straw for the horses was of some concern, as was the absence of wood for fuel; peat would have to be brought in instead. To gather these impressions and to cover so much ground around the coast from Dublin to Galway, let alone some of the interior, he must have spent an inordinate number of hours in the saddle, so it is not surprising that he did not have time to scout out and evaluate positions of strength that might be taken by an army in the way that he had done in south-east England.51 William’s former colleagues in Scotland were active in Ireland: Charles Tarrant began military sketch-maps across Ireland in the 1760s, and John Cleve Pleydell undertook some surveys a decade later, but more systematic coverage of the country was not undertaken until Charles Vallencey began his fieldwork in 1776. This continued until 1798 but it was not based on any general triangulation, and the standards of accuracy and depiction were lower than those that William had already begun to advocate in the 1760s. Vallencey never acknowledged William in his publications, so the two may not have met during the three hectic weeks of William’s visit in the summer of 1765.52 A WINTER IN DUNKIRK

The collection of military intelligence in Ireland had been strategic, open-ended and without any short-term application. In contrast, in October William was ordered to ‘immediately repair to Dunkirk’ for a task that was technically complex and internationally sensitive. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years War, had been signed in February 1763 by Britain, France and Spain (plus, in absentia, Portugal). Its terms53 reflected the extent and intricacy of the global conflict: as well as the confirmation of earlier treaties, and the restitution of prisoners and ships, there were a large number of specific provisions. French interests in Canada were ceded to Britain, although some fishing



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rights and bases were retained; the Mississippi became the dividing line between the British and French possessions in America; islands of strategic or economic importance, scattered around the world from the Caribbean to Senegal and Sumatra, were ceded or restored between the nations; on the mainland of Europe, France gave up territory belonging to Hanover, Hesse, Brunswick and La Lippe Buckeburg; British fortifications would be demolished in Honduras; Spain relinquished all fishing rights around Newfoundland, and ceded Florida to Britain, but had Cuba restored to it. Of the twenty-seven articles in the Treaty, it was Article 13 that involved William in his role as the Inspector of coasts and hinterlands. It read: The town and port of Dunkirk shall be put into the state fixed by the last Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and by former treaties. The cunette shall be destroyed immediately after the exchange of the ratifications of the present Treaty, as well as the forts and batteries which defend the entrance on the side of the sea; and provision shall be made, at the same time, for the wholesomeness of the air, and for the health of the inhabitants, by some other means, to the satisfaction of the King of Great Britain.

The background to this was that Dunkirk, one of the few ports on this stretch of the Channel coast, had long been a privateering base, much too close to the English coast for comfort. It had been developed and defended by Vauban and others in the late seventeenth century, so much so that a provision of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 had been that all of its fortifications should be razed, its harbour filled, and that the two long moles that extended out into the navigable deep water should be levelled. This demolition was largely complete by 1714, but in the years that followed the harbour works were gradually rebuilt, along with four batteries, and new defences for the town (Figure 3.6). During the Seven Years War the harbour basin was re-established and three more batteries built. The terms of the new treaty meant that in the 1760s there was a complex engineering problem to be solved. The conundrum was that the drainage pattern in the area had been manipulated to do two things: to prevent flooding in the low-lying hinterland of the town, and to use the power of the water that was draining off the land to flush the harbour and its channel free of silt, keeping the port operational and preventing the wet defences around the town from stagnating. If, to satisfy the terms of the treaty, this cleansing outfall through the port was restricted or diverted in order to cripple the harbour, the countryside might be

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Figure 3.6  A view of Dunkirk, drawn by Pierre-Alexandre Royer and engraved by Claude Duflos, 1748, showing the fortifications of the town, the inner harbour, the marine forts, and the long moles (jettées) that gave access to deep water. © The British Library Board, K. Top.61.71.a.2

i­nundated – or so the French claimed. Most of the surface water was carried away by the Canal of Furnes which came from the east, parallel to the coast, and by the Canal of Bergues from the south. The cunette, referred to in the treaty, was a large drain that flowed north-westwards for about 10  km into the northern end of the harbour; its source was a shadow lake, The Moëre, which covered an area of about 30 sq km. (This is now all reclaimed land, although the outline of the lake is still traceable in the field patterns.) William had to find the means of solving these problems of water flow, and to do so in such a way as to make it difficult for the French to reinstate the port infrastructure that had to be destroyed.54 When he arrived at the beginning of November 1765, with, as it were, the Treaty of Paris in his pocket, some progress had been made towards the necessary demolition, but it had evidently not progressed as fast as it should have done, and the port of Dunkirk was still viable. The way that matters played out over the next three months depended,



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in no small part, on the personalities involved. The Engineer in charge was John Peter Desmaretz, who was probably then in his late seventies. After service with Marlborough in the War of the Spanish Succession, he had worked on the earlier plans to demolish the port of Dunkirk under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Thereafter he had become an expert in harbour engineering, having worked at Harwich, Chatham, Portsmouth (including the design of Fort Cumberland in 1747), Ramsgate and Shoreham. He certainly had the specialist knowledge to deal with the problems at Dunkirk, but he needed energetic and authoritative support. This was to be William’s role. His assistant, particularly in the surveying that was required, was a Scot, Andrew Fraser, then twenty-three, who had been trained in the Tower by Desmaretz before becoming a Practitioner Engineer in 1759. The third Engineer, Andrew Durnford, aged twenty-one, who had also been trained by Desmaretz, was responsible for drawing the plans and sections of the harbour works and of the drainage canals at Dunkirk. Frazer and Durnford had been in the town, as assistants to their former tutor, since 1764.55 The other important players in this episode were the Hon. Henry Seymour Conway and Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond. Both of these men knew William. Towards the end of the Seven Years War, Conway had been deputy to the Marquess of Granby, under Ferdinand of Brunswick, and in 1762 he had been responsible for the embarkation of the British forces from mainland Europe, an operation in which William had had prominent logistical responsibilities. In July 1765 Conway had been made Secretary of State for the Southern Department, in Rockingham’s administration, and was thus one of the most powerful politicians in the land. One of his earliest actions as Secretary of State had been to sign the King’s order to appoint William to inspect the coasts and hinterlands. In contrast, Richmond (who was Conway’s stepson-in-law) was still at an early stage in his varied career: energetic, hard-working and ambitious, he was also aloof, often tactless and quick-tempered. A university graduate, he had been aide-de-camp to Ferdinand at Minden in 1759 and had then played a significant role during the court martial of Lord George Sackville. In 1765, aged thirty, he had hoped for a senior post in government but was appointed as Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Louis XV at Versailles; characteristically, even before he reached Paris, he had pushed for the demolitions at Dunkirk to be completed – a stance that was hardly likely to endear him to the French.56 Although Colonel Desmaretz was nominally in charge of the project at Dunkirk, in practice it was now to be led by William. His orders

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were to inspect the port and the channel, to ascertain all of the relevant levels in the countryside, to report on the condition of the sluices and on the most effective manner of ensuring ‘the salubrity of the air’. Ten days after receiving his instructions, William had already made an initial inspection, accompanied by Richmond. The cunette, the forts and the batteries had been levelled but the port itself was still operational. Immediately after his visit, Richmond sent William a private letter (not to be shared with Desmaretz or Frazer) setting out his opinion that the two long moles (‘jettées’) should be demolished ‘to the level of the strand’ from the seaward end, and that some of the sluices should be retained. With surprising humility, he deferred to William’s views and said that he was content to be persuaded by them. In his reply, William – methodical as always – said that he was collecting the evidence: making plans and sections of the harbour and of the moles, and taking all of the relevant levels.57 William also received a private letter from Conway: ‘As I have the greatest dependence on your judgement and candour both, and the greatest confidence in your telling me fairly and directly your opinion … it will be a great guide to me.’ Conway was clearly concerned (even more than the Ambassador) about the diplomatic consequences of whatever was decided. ‘I heard some time ago … that if the French were now brusquely pressed for the total demolition at once, they would sooner go to war than consent.’ William, in constant discussion with his French counterparts, therefore had to exercise the utmost tact. It was also crucial that he be candid with Conway and Richmond, and that they had no misapprehensions about his advice. In letters to Richmond, and then to Conway, he wrote: [to Richmond] … all I can say is that with regard to judgement I may have erred, with respect to candour I have not.

[to Conway] One thing I have made a rule, and it is all that I pretend to, that on whatever service I have had the honour to be employed, my best endeavours for its success have been constantly used, and when it was necessary to make a report, I have always done it candidly.

That same month, December 1765, he confessed to another correspondent, ‘I find myself a very bad negotiator; I don’t love much talking … I am for coming to the point.’58 Despite this diminution of his own abilities, he cannot have offended the French, for Richmond asked that either William or Fraser should go to Paris to answer any technical questions that might arise in his discussions with the Duc de Choiseul, a tough negotiator who was determined to reverse the humiliation of defeat. In the event, it seems that the young Ambassador had reached



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an a­ greement about how the moles should be demolished, and thus William’s journey was not necessary.59 Heavy frosts had hindered progress in the field, especially in establishing the levels of the canals, but by the end of January this work was complete; the final drawings, and the preparation of copies, were being prepared and the draft of the report was well advanced. On 4 February, William wrote to Conway, suggesting that he should now return to England because his work was done, and that others would be able to follow it through.60 He offered to bring all of the plans back with him, along with the report that he prepared on behalf of the British team. This report61 described the low-lying topography of this part of French Flanders, the complex, largely man-made, drainage pattern, and the history and development of each canal, the cunette mentioned in the Treaty, and the relevant sluices. With Frazer and Durnford he had meticulously recorded the levels of the canals and of the dykes above low water mark, and they had made observations of the ways that the sluices had operated over the course of 280 tides during their stay. William was sharply critical of the numerous machinations of the French engineers to minimise the effects of the work to destroy the port. The difficulties of making this effective, despite the various treaties, are underlined by an annotation on one of the accompanying plans: ‘Ruins of the Risbank [fort] demolished in 1713, repaired in 1741, and demolished again in 1748. Repaired in 1757 & demolished in 1763.’62 The French were not going to give up the viability of their port without a struggle. In the face of this, and armed with all of the data from his extensive levelling, William was firm. In the foregoing remarks we have endeavoured to give a general idea of the levels of that part of Flanders adjacent to Dunkirk, from which we hope it will appear manifest that the arguments ever so artfully made use of by the French, with regard to the inundations that this part of the country is liable to, are rather frivolous than founded upon fact, at least from the cause which they constantly assign, namely an obstruction given to the écoulement [flow and discharge] of the waters in the channel itself.

He recommended that the moles should be demolished to the level of the sands, and two options were put forward for getting rid of the surface water from the hinterland: an enhanced outfall from the Mardyke, to the West of the town, or the cutting of a new channel through the citadel. Both of these solutions would mean that the water would bypass the harbour, which would then silt up. In an additional option, the western of the two moles could remain, but the channel should be n ­ arrowed to

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a width of about 25 to 30 metres (restricting it to small vessels only) by effectively moving the eastern mole westwards. Had this recommendation been taken up, and insisted upon, it would have been difficult and expensive for the French to undo. Although action had to be taken to satisfy the terms of the Treaty, William was realistic enough to recognise that the natural advantages offered by the marine topography, in providing a safe anchorage just offshore, meant that the preservation of the port at Dunkirk was always going to be of the utmost importance to France, which ‘accounts for the delays and difficultys they have hitherto made towards its demolition, and will ever induce them to restore it when times and circumstances may favour their design’. William travelled back to England with Richmond, who left Calais on 20 February 1766, allegedly on a fishing boat for a rapid passage; Colonel Roy delivered the report and the plans to Secretary of State Conway two days later.63 In offering to bring these himself,64 William was not just thinking about the security of the documents. There was another spur: ‘… one that I have never had occasion to make use of before, viz. the state of my health, which was very indifferent when I left England, and has not been bettered by my winter’s occupation at Dunkirk’. This was the first intimation of the malady that was to dog him every winter for the rest of his life. Now thirty-nine, and energetic and conscientious, he was having to admit to himself, and to others, that good health could not be assumed. MAKING PLANS: FOR A NATIONAL MAP

Ensconced in the warmth and comfort of Great Pulteney Street, away from the frosts of Flanders, William turned his attention once more to the idea of establishing a national cartographic survey. During those months in France he may have been particularly conscious that Britain was falling behind, for the sheets of the Cassini survey that covered Dunkirk and its hinterland had been published before 1760.65 No details survive of his proposal for a British equivalent, made in 1763, nor of the response that he had received, but, following the winter months in Dunkirk, he now had new contacts among the decision-makers in government, and this may have encouraged him to try again. There was another fresh factor also. In setting out his new ideas, he gave special attention to the shorelines of Britain, so it seems likely that his scheme was advanced in his capacity as the Inspector of coasts, the role that he had begun the previous summer. The application for funding must have been an appeal to the King, but on the copy that survives there is



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no addressee, and no signature. It is, however, dated 24 May 1766, and this may be significant. The original intention may have been to send it through Conway – as the Secretary of State for the Southern Department who had signed his appointment as Inspector on behalf of the King – but suddenly there was a more attractive option, as that month the Duke of Richmond had succeeded Conway as Secretary of State. William evidently had a good relationship with Charles Lennox, and the two may well have discussed the military need for a consistent cartographic resource during their journey together from Calais. The proposal of 24 May clearly necessitated some formal verbosity, so the document is headed Considerations on the Propriety of making a General Military Map of England, with the Method proposed for ­carrying it into Execution, & an Estimate of the Expence.66 The ideas and language closely echoed those of William’s Military Description of the South East Part of England, highlighting the natural strengths that the topography afforded, if an enemy landing was successful. The purpose of the national map was indeed essentially military, and this, he argued, was the time to start it: during peacetime, knowledge should be acquired of ‘… the nature of the coast, and the principal positions & posts which an army should occupy, when called upon to defend the country against its enemies … The only method of attaining this knowledge, seems to be, by making a good military plan or map of the whole country … .’ It appears from the proposal of 1766 that the scheme that had been advanced three years earlier had been a more sophisticated one, probably similar in its specification to that of the Cassini survey in France; William now recognised that this was too expensive, and he pragmatically reduced his sights. As he had envisaged before, in relation to an enhancement of the Military Survey of Scotland, he now sought to make use of the existing materials, but to fix them within a more accurate and robust framework. His new approach relied upon the growing number of county maps,67 of which the proposal listed eight that he considered to be of an acceptable standard; there were also ‘tolerable’ maps of Sussex and Cornwall, and he was in no doubt that others of an appropriate quality would be made if subscriptions could be raised and if government support was to be forthcoming. He judged that the better county maps were ‘… sufficiently exact, in what regards their geometrical measurement, for common purposes, but are extremely defective with respect to the topographical representation of the ground, giving scarcely any idea … of what is remarkably strong or weak in the nature of the country’. That is, they were of limited military value. What he envisaged now was a simple, selective triangulation,

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focusing on the coast, the hills and the principal rivers, that would provide the framework required. Specific military priorities might be accurately plotted, but other detail within the triangles could be taken from the relevant county survey and then checked by intersection. The priority area for this mapping would be southern England, from the Bristol Channel to the Wash, i.e. the area most susceptible to invasion. Continuing that theme, the coast, and a strip of countryside two miles deep within it, ‘should be very minutely surveyed’, and the depiction of detail was to extend a short distance offshore – aiding a wider understanding of navigability – although William considered that this information could usually be extracted from Admiralty surveys. The overall accuracy of the map would of course depend upon the quality of the instruments used, and upon the care taken in the triangulation that would provide its foundation. In suggesting that the principal triangles should be recorded by the Director of the survey, from a base six to eight miles long, William revealed his usual anxiety about the consistent application of standards, and some lack of trust in delegating this task to others. His list of the instruments that would be required for the project demonstrates how far he had come from the simple circumferentors of the Military Survey in Scotland, especially in the inclusion of: ‘A quadrant 2½ feet radius, for taking horizontal or vertical angles … a small quadrant to be used occasionally in situations where the large one could not conveniently be fixed’, and ‘a transit & equal altitude instrument for tracing the Meridian Line’. If the map was to cover the whole country, it would indeed require its own meridian ‘… thro’ the whole extent of the island, marked by obelisks from distance to distance like that thro’ France’. The Greenwich meridian was not seen to be as helpful as one that passed through Dunnet Head, in Caithness, the most northerly point on the British mainland. In stressing the need for this, William was looking at the bigger picture as this would provide ‘… about 8½ degrees of the Meridian of the Earth exactly measured, intermediate to those measured in France and at the Polar Circle’, and would thus generate more data on the ‘spheroidical figure’ of the globe. More immediately, William was seeking to tie his national map into a wider web of geodetic control, even though there was no agreed meridian to fix it on. At this stage, when the problem of establishing longitude at sea was still far from resolution, and Nevil Maskelyne was preparing his landmark publication of The Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris (1767), based on observations at Greenwich, many sailors would simply fix their meridian at their point of departure. Even in formal published contexts there were several meridians



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in use, and it was not until the 1780s that national meridians achieved some slow acceptance.68 As to scale, a consideration was the extent to which buildings and enclosed land could be shown, in addition to the topography, all factors that might be important in a military context. The proposal explicitly sought a compromise between the Military Survey of Scotland (1,000 yards to the inch) and the Cassini’s national map of France on which 1,000 yards was represented by less than half an inch. ‘An inch or an inch and a quarter to a mile, appears to be a good scale’, wrote William, tacitly accepting the 1-inch standard advocated by the Society of Arts for county maps. This choice, which was maintained by the Ordnance Survey for nearly two centuries, may have been reinforced by what he had seen of Prussian military cartography during his years in Germany; he was also accurately anticipating the nineteenth- and twentieth-century discussions that would lead eventually to the introduction of the Ordnance Survey Landranger maps in 1974.69 ‘Separate plans of the coasts or such other parts as might be thought of most [military] consequence, might be drawn by a scale of two inches to a mile’, but the proposals left it quite unclear as to how these more detailed plans might be presented. Finally, there was the question of costs. This was a delicate balancing act; William could not pitch the costs too low, and thus risk accusations of financial incompetence later on, but if he increased the estimates to a safer level, including a full suite of appropriate contingencies, he might alarm his potential supporters. Confidence in the product, and economy in production, would be assured by the Engineers taking the lead: allocation was made for six field teams – each consisting of five men and a subaltern – commanded by two Captains, and for a draughtsman and a clerk. Staff costs were the biggest factor, but William tried to cover everything, including stationery, forage, fuel for heating and candles for light. The total projected for the first year of operation, excluding the Director’s travelling expenses, but allowing £400 for the purchase of the instruments, came to £2,778 12s. Subtracting the initial capital cost of the instruments, the costs could be rounded to an average annual rate of £2,500; so, over the six or eight years that he envisaged the project would need, the bill should come to £15,000 to 20,000. William did, however, advocate the option of using soldiers (as in Scotland) rather than labourers; this would result in a nominal annual saving of about £200, nearly 10 per cent, and a much more efficient culture of command and management. The only contingency allowed for was for the signals that might be necessary for the triangulation. Overall, in the nature of such things, £20,000 was probably an underestimate.70

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Given the King’s strong interest in topography, it might have been expected that William’s proposals would have been taken up with some enthusiasm. It seems clear from what he wrote much later71 that he was promised that he would be put in charge of this national survey, but we do not know why the proposals were never acted upon. This has been blamed on the rumbling threat of trouble in the American colonies, evident in the furious response to the Stamp Act, and that may be partly true, although a more direct explanation probably lies in the turmoil of British politics at the time. Rockingham had formed an administration in June 1765, and the following May had to find a new Secretary of State when the Duke of Grafton resigned; the choice fell upon the Duke of Richmond. There is no record of the route by which William’s proposal was submitted but Richmond had just come into post and the timing may have been more than coincidental. (The two were certainly in touch: on 31 May, William sent Richmond his request for payment of the huge bill for the months in Dunkirk.72) However, if William had hoped to enjoy Richmond’s patronage – and thus the King’s – he was to be disappointed. George III had not forgiven the Duke for an intemperate resignation from the Bedchamber in 1760, and he had opposed Richmond’s appointment as Secretary of State. Relations between the Duke and his sovereign only deteriorated further during the former’s seven short weeks in office before Rockingham was replaced by Pitt in late July.73 In the event, if William had indeed sought Richmond’s support (Conway, a more successful survivor, would have been a safer choice), he was probably lucky that he escaped being tainted by association. SUPPLIES, LOGISTICS AND ADVICE

The fragility of peace in America was probably the trigger for a rumour in the press in that same month of May 1766: ‘We hear Colonel Roy, of the artillery [sic], is soon to embark for New-York, to make an actual survey of the fortifications along the coast.’74 Although no record has been traced to verify the idea, it is at least plausible in William’s role as Inspector of coasts and hinterlands. That is more that can be said of another, more fantastical report,75 nearly ten years later, when the War of Independence was underway in 1775, which summoned the ghost of Rob Roy: Two great men we hear have offered their service to government for raising men, and we are credibly informed their proposals have been accepted, viz. Major General Fraser is to raise two thousand of his clan, and Lieut. Colonel



The Military Engineer 97 Roy one thousand more of the McGregors, of whom he is believed to be the chief. By these, and other more vigorous measures that are soon to be adopted, the Yankees will be taught to believe in the Scots motto “Nemo me impune lacessit.”

Such journalism highlights the profile not only of the individual but also of the military Engineers as a whole. Theirs was a profession which was seen as crucial to the future of the country and as having a touch of glamour, akin to that of space scientists in the 1960s, or that of digital pioneers more recently. The Engineers also had a quiver of bewildering jargon, an occult language of technical terms – especially in the science of fortification – which Laurence Sterne played on with such teasing satire in the character of Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy. Back in Scotland, the career path of William’s brother, James, was not one that generated gossipy snippets in the newspapers. Having served his congregation in Edinburgh for eight years, in November 1765 he took on the parish of Prestonpans, nine miles away, on the coast of East Lothian. It was a prosperous urban community, engaged in salt extraction, potteries, chemicals, agriculture and an oyster fishery. It had a particularly fine church, of 1596 (one of the first to be built in Scotland after the Reformation), and a school where William’s former commanding officer, Robert Murray Keith, had been educated. At the same time that William was settling into his first house, in Great Pulteney Street, James was setting up home in Prestonpans. He bought new furniture ‘of the best kinds and fashion’, and provided himself with a good milk cow. In his professional life, his ability had come to national attention within the Church of Scotland, and he was one of the four ministers chosen to preach before the High Commissioner during the General Assembly in June 1766. Everything was going well, but little more than a year later, on 3 September 1767, James died; he was thirty-seven. That William was heartbroken is evident from the headstone (Figure 3.7) that he erected over his brother’s grave, on the south side of the church. The inscription is in Latin and begins with the opening line of an ode by Horace, addressed to Virgil on the death of their mutual friend, Quintilius Varus: ‘Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus tam cari capitis?’ ‘What restraint or limit should there be to grief for one so dear?’ James is described as ‘the best of men’ and, in giving his age, William used a formula that is common on funerary inscriptions from Roman Britain: ‘vixit annos xxxvii’ ‘he conquered 37 years’. The inscription may not have been intelligible to all who saw it, but William was speaking with his brother, in language that they could both understand, literally and emotionally.76

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Figure 3.7 The headstone that William erected on the grave of his brother, James, outside the parish church at Prestonpans

In the late 1760s William moved into senior roles in supplies and logistics; he was called upon to give advice, to make assessments and recommendations, and he also got involved in improving standards for the next generation. The work that he took on came in all shapes and sizes, from the review of major developments to individual claims for payment.77 As for so many others, the army had taught the factor’s son from rural Clydesdale how to be at ease with all ranks: dukes and politicians, contractors and ordinary soldiers. As a result, he now had an effective network of friends and contacts; moreover, he seems to have had an ability to retain the loyalty and respect of those whom he came to know. Thus, for instance, in 1769 he was in correspondence with his former colleague from the Military Survey, John Cleve Pleydell, about the Palace at Winchester, designed by Sir Christopher Wren for Charles II, which had been abandoned unused after the King’s death in 1685. They discussed the details of a structural survey that Pleydell had carried out as part of a proposal to convert the Palace into barracks.78 Pleydell wrote a long, illustrated letter, but what marks out its tone from the usual round of professional civilities is the warmth of the envoi. ‘Thus dear Colonel, I must sincerely hope I have answered your queries … Let me … assure you, that it gives me (and indeed always will) the most true satisfaction in doing whatever might be agreeable to you, being with the



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greatest regard and respect, my dear Colonel, your most obliged friend and faithfull hum: serv.t, J.C. Pleydell.’ People seemed to have liked William, even though he expected the same high standards of others as he did of himself. Their occasional failure to match his expectations could make him tetchy. This was most evident in his irritation with the instrument-maker Jesse Ramsden in the 1780s (see Chapter 6), but another instance is recorded in a letter79 that he sent when he was away from home, in Lanark, in July 1774. Tho’ I had left written directions in the Post Office at Edinburgh with respect to the forwarding of my letters, yet by the most astonishing negligence of the people there, I have only received about half my newspapers and very few letters. This appeared to me so strange that I have wrote to London to inform the Secretary of the General Post Office there of the matter … .’

Despite this intolerant strain, his integrity and directness meant there was no grandstanding in the advice that he gave, and no pretence of entitlement or importance. Thus, in a report80 on the fortifications at Gibraltar, in June 1769, he made it quite clear that he had not been able to make a visit, so his advice had to be based on those documents, plans and illustrations that were to hand – and that, in consequence, his report would therefore carry less weight than if it had been based on first-hand experience. His views were sought after because he could be relied upon to deliver the dispassionate advice that was required, just as he had done at Dunkirk, earning Richmond’s trust. Similarly, in 1771–2 the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (Viscount Townshend, who had been Lieutenant General of the Ordnance) was keen to capitalise on William’s knowledge of the southern half of the country and to get his input to his schemes for the quartering of the army and of its stores, especially in Cork, and at Ardfinnan in County Tipperary. Townshend pressed for this and repeatedly backed William’s earlier recommendation for a new magazine at Ringsend, in Dublin.81 Elsewhere he prepared reports on the fortification of Portsmouth in 1770, on the quartering of troops in Jersey and Guernsey in 1775, and on the provision of magazines (containing stores of all kinds) around London in 1778.82 Another reason for his success was that he carried out his orders with efficiency and clarity. An example of this occurred in 1773 when  – probably with some sense of irony – he had to reapply his mind to the arguments over Dunkirk. Because the final agreement had been less robust than the recommendations that he had made in 1766, the French had reportedly made considerable progress in repairing the infrastructure of the harbour, so William had been sent out to make an

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assessment. This he had done in September, but on 28 October he was ordered by the King (through Lord Rochford) to consider the reports made by the Engineers still on the spot, Frazer and Durnford, and to clarify where they disagreed with each other and with the account that had been sent to the French Court by the Count d’Herouville. William responded the very next day in a six-page letter of about 1,300 words, perfectly spaced in his clear flowing hand, and with no corrections apart from three very neat insertions. Such a balanced judgement, and the meticulous presentation of clearly expressed information, was bound to inspire confidence and trust, and it certainly found favour with the King.83 That regal favour had its consequences. In 1774, the colonists in New England had been enraged by Lord North’s repressive legislative programme and by the restraint of trade and fisheries. This anger led to the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, in Massachusetts, the following April, to the American Declaration of Independence, and then to war. The immense logistical challenge of maintaining campaigns on the far side of the Atlantic must have been daunting, and without reliable supply lines the army would be doomed to failure from the outset. Efficiency, probity, forethought and experience were required to make it all work. In October, the King appointed William ‘… to superintend all matters relating to providing and shipping such stores and necessaries as shall be sent hence for the use of the forces in North America’. If the logistics were not difficult enough, he was also answerable to the War Office, the two Secretaries of State, the Treasury and to the Admiralty.84 For this role, under the eyes so many masters, he was to be paid the handsome sum of 40 s (£2) per day, but it was a formidable task. In 1774 the complement of the British army in North America amounted to less than 7,000 men; after the disaster of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga in 1777 this was increased to 40,000.85 (William’s own background may have been a bonus as the army in America contained a disproportionate number of Scots.86) The basics – food for men and for horses, fuel for warmth and cooking, and care for the sick and wounded – had to be assured, and although some of these things could be supplemented locally, this could not be relied upon, simply because of the large numbers of troops involved, and because George Washington strenuously dissuaded the inhabitants from providing the British with supplies.87 Other items, such as tents, clothing, entrenching tools and baggage animals, were the subject of commercial contracts that had to be called for, awarded and monitored. Costs had to be contained, budgets had to be met and opportunities for fraud had to be minimised.



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Those in charge of the system had to be tough enough to deal with conflicts of interest, yet sensitive to changes in requirements and in sources of supply; this was no easy matter as there were perennial problems with local contractors, and with the vulnerability of convoys at sea.88 Most importantly, in an extended supply line, trust on all sides had to be achieved and maintained. No records have yet come to light to illustrate William’s performance in this long-distance role, although he certainly used his network of friends on the ground to keep him abreast of the military campaigns.89 The best evidence that his work was satisfactory is that he was promoted to the rank of Colonel in the army in August 1777 and then, in June 1778, to be Commissary General of Stores, Provisions and Forage. This appointment was conditional to it not interfering with the discharge of his duties as Deputy Quartermaster General,90 but William never seems to have shied away from tackling more than one job at a time. For this new position he was probably paid no less than the £3 per day which his predecessor had received, and that would have been wholly just because this was a large role: only about a third of the expenditure on war in the eighteenth century related to the pay of the troops; much of the rest was devoted to supplies and logistics. As he had already experienced in getting supplies to the army in America, the system depended upon local assistants and upon civilian contractors: advance payments to those contractors for the supply of stores had to be calculated, and their accounts had to be scrutinised; competitive tendering had to be organised and returns made to the Treasury on such matters as the number of effective horses that were available. The Commissary General was also responsible for ensuring that there was neither overstocking nor scarcity,91 exemplified by a letter that William wrote in 1778 with a direction that the stock of supplies in the camps at Coxheath and Warley Common (see below) should be reduced from two weeks to one, and that the surplus should be sold immediately at auction. Similarly, in his accounts for the camp magazines in America he made a return for the sale of stores that were left after the troops had marched into winter quarters.92 William’s appointment as Commissary General was something of a departure from previous practice: his predecessor, Sir Abraham Hume, had had a great deal of experience as a businessman and as a contractor in supply chains before taking up the post. In William, the expertise that was accorded priority was military rather than commercial, although this role had echoes of the one that John Roy, and his father before him, had played as factor to the estates of Hallcraig and Milton. William was simply having to tackle it on a much larger scale. The emphasis on

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military knowledge and skills for the Commissary General evidently worked well as William was in due course succeeded by another army officer, his old friend from Minden, Robert Bisset.93 The job involved working in very different levels. At one end of the scale the sums for which he was responsible were very substantial: in February 1780 William provided a return to the Secretary at War, Lord Liverpool, about ‘the supplies furnished by the contractor to the troops that were in the field in 1779 … [for which] the expense to Government amounts to £74,814 19s 7d’, an enormous amount at that time. In a more operational task, he had to estimate the annual expense of providing an extra feed each day (oats and beans, and straw) to the horses of the Dragoons employed in the suppression of smuggling. ‘No more is to be charged than the actual expenditure.’ Such careful husbandry will have made him popular with government, for contracts to supply the army were seen by the general public – not always fairly – as excessively profitable, and there was always a fear that corruption was prevalent.94 In this the officers of the army were not above suspicion, and in 1782 the Commissioners of Accounts chose to examine ‘that part of the public money granted for the extraordinary services of the army which has been expended in North America’. This inquiry focused on transport and logistics: the payment for waggons, horses and drivers. A specific issue was whether fraud had been committed without the knowledge of the senior officers who signed off the accounts, and who often had no direct knowledge of the payments made by their subordinates. A particular problem was that some quartermasters had been allowed to have an interest in the waggons and horses themselves, from which they made considerable profits. To make matters worse, there was insufficient examination of the documentation of the hiring process, so the abuse (far away across the Atlantic) had been almost invisible. Called upon to give evidence to the inquiry, William offered an example of best practice, describing his role, as Assistant Quartermaster General in 1758, in controlling the costs of the disembarkation and quartering of the 20,000 troops who had passed through the territory of the States General. Charges had been settled according to an agreed tariff, and daily receipts were issued; funds had been handled by the Deputy Paymaster General. None of the officers had received any public money on account, but they effectively operated checks and controls ‘to see that the articles supplied were good of their kind, adequate to the services they were intended for, and that there was no waste’. It was no small matter: the bill for the disembarkation and quartering had been about £30,000, yet it had been a success for probity, for proper accounting



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and for the smooth running of the operation itself. The Commissioners came to the view that if orders issued by Lord Cornwallis in 1780 had been adopted, the public would have been spared a staggering £417,592 of unnecessary expenditure.95 The office of Commissary General must at times have been a gruelling assignment, so any lighter moments may have been especially appreciated; although the written record that William left behind him is usually formal and unbending, he was a sociable man within his circle, and this particular role provided some gentle humour in the newspapers: An officer belonging to a regiment of militia on Coxheath got leave to visit Warley-common; in his journey he was joined by a gentleman who observed the poor condition of his horse, and asked what it was owing to? The young man, with all the warmth of a country lad inexperienced in the world, began to abuse the Commissary General, Colonel Roy, at whose door he laid the fault, saying that the Colonel and his gang had taken care that the officers rations should not be near the complement allowed by government: he concluded his observations with many hearty curses against the Colonel. The gentleman listened very patiently to the abuse, and only hoped that Colonel Roy was not so much in fault as was apprehended. Shortly after they were met by some officers, who saluted the gentleman by the name of Colonel Roy, to the greatest astonishment and confusion of the young man, who the Colonel could not after this prevail upon to keep him company to Warley.96

Had the young officer been able to swallow his embarrassment and to accept the company of Colonel Roy for the rest of the journey, he might have realised that the Commissary General had a professional interest in understanding more precisely why his horse was so poor – perhaps to his advantage – and he might also have appreciated that the older man had a particular concern to help those starting out on their military careers. This concern was expressed in two broad forms, the first of which was the support that he gave to the training of recruits. In 1776, when Reuben Burrow had been appointed to the Drawing Room in the Tower of London to teach mathematics, William had taken an interest in the whole curriculum.97 This covered everything that a student needed to know about the application of mathematics to gunnery, the methods of determining latitude and longitude, the measurement of heights and distances, and the techniques for describing the landscape. The best students from the Drawing Room and from the Academy at Woolwich were to be sent to Landguard Fort, near Felixstowe, to survey and map the country so that ‘they will enter upon immediate service more fit after practice than from the desk’. Experience in the field always trumped theory. All of this aligns with William’s two sets of established Instructions,

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on reconnoitring and on surveying, which lasted into the nineteenth century, and with his appointment, in 1784, as Commanding Engineer of the company entitled ‘Surveying and ready for Field Service’.98 At home, the contents of William’s own library99 also showed how much, as an autodidact, he valued learning on a wide range of subjects: long after he needed them for himself he still bought books such as those by Thomas Simes: Military Medley (1768), A Military Guide for Young Officers (1772), A Military Course for the Government and Conduct of a Battalion (1777) and A Treatise on the Military Science (1780), in many of which he was listed as a subscriber. There was also The Young Mathematician’s Guide (1771) by Thomas Ward; An Essay on Military Education (1773) and A System of Military Mathematics (1776) by Lewis Lochee; A New System of Mathematics (1769), and three other books on fortifications, by John Muller of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich; and two editions of The Elements of Navigation by John Robertson of the Royal [Naval] Academy at Portsmouth. The second way in which William supported officers early in their careers was through active patronage. This was expressed in the recommendations that William made to his peers on behalf of a number of promising young officers. Although he himself had worked his way up through the ranks largely on his own merits, William would have been very conscious of the power and utility of patronage. Thus, in his time as Commissary General he wrote letters of recommendation or introduction to Lieutenant General Frederick Haldimand, the Governor of the Province of Quebec, on behalf of younger colleagues who, from their surnames, were probably Scots. These were: George Gordon, ‘formerly belonging to the Commissariate in Canada’; Mr Inglis, the Master of The Quebec Trader, ‘known to me … who commands a stout ship’; and Captain Cullen of the 53rd Regiment, ‘a spirited officer of great merit’ who had been wounded in the Battle of Hubbarton in 1777 during the British pursuit of the American forces after they had abandoned Fort Ticonderoga. However, as no crystal ball is ever available, the writing of references is not without risk to the referee. One of those whom William had written to support was James Glenie, an erratically brilliant mathematician from Fife who had already contributed two papers to the Royal Society, and for whom William had signed the nomination paper for Fellowship of the Society in 1779. Hugely competent but ­perennially attracted to controversy, Glenie had transferred from the Artillery to the Engineers in Canada where he was court martialled and found guilty of insubordination. As a senior officer, William was asked to intervene, with the result that the decision was overturned and Glenie’s



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rank restored. William evidently felt vindicated, even though Glenie was to continue to cause trouble.100 INVASION FEARS AND COUNTERMEASURES

In his detailed recommendations101 for the location of magazines (centralised stores) around London, which William sent to the Commanderin-Chief, Lord Amherst, in 1778, he rehearsed the general fear of invasion and of its consequences, a subject with which he had been engaged, on and off, since 1755. If there was an enemy incursion on the south coast William expected that the nobility and gentry would corral their tenants into militia who, with an admixture of regular troops, could be of service in collecting and transporting the supplies intended to fill London’s magazines. The army should guard the distribution from the stores which would have to be made ‘with the strictest economy, and in the most just and equal manner’, but if this failed, and a real scarcity of food was popularly thought likely, William presented Amherst with an apocalyptic vision of what might transpire: the bands that unite societies would be loosened and universal distrust and want of confidence would take place … then the most horrid scenes of plunder, rapine and every species of violence would immediately follow … the common people … would take by force whatever was to be found … The distresses of the nation might then be said to be at their utmost height, and it would require the depth of human wisdom … to prevent its ruin.

The threat of invasion was real enough. In June 1779 Spain entered the American war and took the opportunity to combine its fleet with that of France to take control of the Channel. There was grave concern that the defences at Plymouth were extremely vulnerable and could have succumbed in only a few hours, although, as it turned out, the foreign fleets achieved nothing before being driven out of the Channel by an easterly gale. Inland, William was involved with assessments about those roads which were suitable for heavy baggage and artillery, about those which could be obstructed with felled trees to delay the enemy, and about how the labourers required might be organised.102 To counteract the possibility of civil disorder, and the invasion itself, it was decided that a network of garrisons would be required to defend the magazines as well as London itself. This was the background to the establishment of a number of camps, designed to accommodate militia and regular troops, which kept William busy in 1778 and for two or three years thereafter.

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Two camps, close to London, became particularly well known: at Coxheath, in Kent, just to the south-west of Maidstone, and at Warley, in Essex, on the outskirts of Brentwood. These were very substantial encampments which were marked out on the ground by William for their second season in June 1779.103 (He had most probably designed the layout for their first season the year before.) Warley was two-thirds of the size of the huge Coxheath, which was over 3 km long and more than 300 m deep, strung out across the turnpike between Maidstone and Rye (Figure 3.8). It accommodated eighteen regiments of infantry, much employed in weapons training and drill, and in the practice of large-scale manoeuvres. The camp was a considerable logistical undertaking, demanding all the usual supplies: thousands of tents, food for the 17,000 men and for the horses, and wood for fuel. William seems to have been responsible for the provision of most of this, for regulating the flow of supplies, and for selling off any surplus.104 As Coxheath was within easy reach of the capital, the camp developed into a place of fashionable resort: the King and Queen and the Commander-in-Chief reviewed the troops there in 1778105 and, as visitors and spectators were not discouraged, so commercial facilities had to be included, and guided tours arranged. It was ‘London en compagne’.106 The displays and the rehearsals of battles performed equally important functions: to train the troops, certainly, but also to prepare the population (especially the opinion-formers) for the possibility of invasion. Considerable care went into the selection of a suitable site for a camp, and this seems to have been one of William’s specialities. After all, he had had a great deal of experience in military camps: at first on a very small scale during all those summers on the Military Survey of Scotland, and then with the main body of the army in Germany during the Seven Years War. In addition to there being a sufficient expanse of level ground, the factors that he took into account in making a recommendation are illustrated by a short report107 that he made in April 1780 on the suitability of a number of potential camp sites in Essex that might replace the well-used Warley: Tiptree Heath, between Chelmsford and Colchester; Danbury, to the east of Chelmsford; and Havering Plain, now crossed by the M25, just to the west of Brentwood. At Tiptree he commented on the clay soil, and the lack of drainage which would mean that a trench would have to be dug around each tent. More positively, he also noted the springs and ponds adjacent, although if the summer was particularly dry the horses might have to be taken to the Blackwater, two miles away. He concluded that in a normal year the Tiptree site would be acceptable for two to three months, but that its occupation should not

Figure 3.8  Georgian castrametation: in 1778 William laid out the army camp at Coxheath, near Maidstone. Over 3 km long, it covered more than 100 hectares. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021. RCIN 734036

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extend too late in the season. Another factor that he considered was the ease of clearing the ground in the first place: Danbury was on gravel, so the site itself was dry, with some good springs nearby, but it was covered with gorse and scrub so a great deal of preparation would be required. Finally, if a location was reused, would there be problems about it still being fouled by debris and latrines from the previous season? William’s role was to make balanced recommendations: On the whole, therefore, it remains to be decided whether the troops in Essex are likely to suffer most inconveniences from camping on wet new ground or from occupying for a third time the remarkably dry old ground [at Warley] with a copious supply of excellent water, and where it is natural to suppose that anything insalubrious from the former encampments has been corrected by the long frost of the last winter.

These tactical and practical factors were the ones that had always been considered by every army in choosing a site, whether it was to be the base for training or for a campaign; when it came to the detailed design of camps, the army that William knew had a great deal in common with those of his distant predecessors. At Coxheath (Figure 3.8) and at Warley he marked out straight rows of nine to a dozen small ridgepole tents for each company of soldiers, with a larger tent at one end for the sergeant; each row was provided with an arms-chest and a bell-tent for equipment. The small marquees occupied by the officers stood apart, beyond the ranks.108 By this stage in his life William knew that all of this would have been instantly recognisable to the regiments of the Roman army that had been active in Britain sixteen centuries earlier; in castrametation, nothing had really changed. Although William had another decade ahead of him as an Engineer, this is an appropriate point to go back in time, to the 1750s, and to chart his involvement with that other, much earlier, set of military camps, ones that were not designed and marked out as part of plans to resist invasion, but which were put in place by the invaders themselves. NOTES 1. TNA OS 3/408; O’Donoghue 1977, 31, no. 46. The other Practitioners appointed at the same time included David Dundas, William Dundas and Charles Tarrant (Porter 1889, 172). 2. London Gazette, 24 January 1756, 2. 3. The Engineers only obtained officer status in 1757 when the Duke of Cumberland interceded with the King on their behalf to confer military



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rank: Marshall 1980, 29. The history and structure of the establishment under the Board of Ordnance is conveniently summarised by Anderson 2009a, 43–60, and in Seymour 1980, 2–4. 4. Wheater 1870, 6. The renumbering was occasioned by the reduction of the 50th and 51st ‘for misbehaviour in America’. 5. Porter 1889, 174; King George III’s Topographical Collection, British Library: British Museum 1844, 51–2; Skempton et al. 2002, 760. William drew a second copy of the plan of the Haven, and a third was prepared by John Cleve Pleydell. Reports and estimates were prepared, and eventually there were deliberations by a committee, but the coast of Wales was not seen as a priority in the conflict with France, so no work was taken forward. 6. RCIN 731 071; Hodson 2020. 7. TNA MR 1/925. 8. BL K.Top.119.90; Coad 1981, 18; TNA MR 1/925; Hodson 1978, 92–3. 9. BL K.Top.6.112; 6. 98–9; 16.31.1; 16.30; 6.100; 6.107. For a portion of William’s survey of the road from Salisbury to Dorchester, made in June 1756, see Close 1969, opp. p. 29. William’s report: A Military Description of the South East Part of England: NRS GD 364/2/208. 10. Proceedings 1758, 37, 55, 89–90. Porter 1889, 182–3. For a general but rather dated (1907) account of the expedition to Rochefort, see Corbett 2001, 147–67. 11. Corbett 2001, 206–11. Hodson 2020; RCIN 732066.a and b. William was aboard the Essex, along with David Dundas who wrote a very similar letter to David Watson with a copy of William’s sketch-map: RCIN 732067.c and a. Maps of the environs of Saint-Malo, extending east to Cancale, have been attributed to William and to Dundas: they show the routes that the British army took to Saint-Servan. Some are simple and were probably drawn at the time (RCIN 732056.a and b), others are worked-up copies (RCIN 732055.a and c). 12. Whitworth 1958, 286–7. For overviews of the role of Engineers and of military cartography, see HC4, 383–93 (P. Bret) and 949–1017. 13. For the story of the build-up to the battle, the operations on the day, and of the court martial that followed, see Mackesy 1979. 14. Sackville 1760, 71, 104. Bisset came from Glenalbert, on the Tay, upstream from Dunkeld. (The house there has been demolished). Gentleman’s Magazine, 81 (1811), 604. There are a large number of letters from Bisset, in Germany in 1759–60, in the Hotham Thompson Collection, Hull University Archives. His brother, Thomas, was the Master of The Eagle when James Cook had served in her from 1755–7 (Robson 2012). Robert was to be a signatory of William’s will in 1786. 15. RCIN 732110.b (MS version); Hodson 2020; Wheeler 2018. For the language of cartouches, see HC4, 244–51 (J.-M. Besse and N. Verdier) 16. HC4, 962 (V. Pansini), 1013–14 (B. L. Dunnigan).

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17. Campbell 1832, 32–4. 18. RCIN 732110.b (MS version), 732111.a (printed); Hodson 2020. He may conceivably have seen Richard Popinjay’s late sixteenth-century map of Portsmouth, or the drawings of the towers on the Gironde, in south-western France, made in 1680 and c. 1700, that had used the same  technique: Hodson 1978, 33. Phare de Cordouan: K.Top.63.40; see also the tower opposite Blaye, not far away (K.Top.63.35), drawn in c. 1700. 19. TNA SP 87/35 f. 150–1: letter from the Earl of Holdernesse to Prince Ferdinand; TNA OS 3/2: two letters from Reden, and one from [?] Miles in The Tower of London; Scots Magazine, 3 September and 5 November 1759. As much of the business of the allies was conducted in French, it  was probably during these years in Germany that William acquired his facility in the language which was to stand him in good stead in the 1780s. 20. DNB (A. Du Toit 2011); Stewart 1825, 90–103; Smyth 1849, 99–110; letter from Reden, 8 June 1760, TNA OS 3/2. 21. University of Hull Archives, UDDHO/4/11/52. 22. RCIN 733015.a–d; Hodson 2020. 23. RCIN 733015.e. ff. 43–4. 24. HC4, 1440 (W. Dolz). 25. RCIN 733040; Hodson 2020. The scale is 1 inch to the mile. 26. TNA Prob 11/1194; Dundas 1788, 263. 27. RCIN 732111a; advertisements for the printed plan in The Dublin Courier, 29 April to 5 September 1760; Mackesy 1979, 136–8. In Sackville 1760: William with Robert Bisset, 71, 104, 156, 213; William’s plan referred to, 79–81, 84, 86, 192; the verdict, 224. 28. TNA PROB 11/873/54 (Watson’s Will); TNA OS 3/409 (DQMG). 29. Scots Magazine, 2 August 1762. Keith’s Highlanders, to which William had been attached, marched back to Scotland at the end of the war and were then disbanded. Robert Murray Keith himself became a successful diplomat in Copenhagen and Vienna: DNB (Alexander Du Toit 2011). 30. TNA WO 30/119; O’Donoghue 1977, 32–3. 31. TNA SP 87/48 ff. 70–1. The States General was the representative body of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Edward Sandford was Major General in the 52nd Regiment. For contemporary letters from William to Charles Hotham in December 1762, see University of Hull Archives UDDHO/4/14/57, 59. 32. Molleson 1783, 496. 33. BL Add MS 44081 f. 92. 34. HC4, 1428–35 (C. Bousquet-Bressolier). 35. Konvitz 1987, 22–5; Edney 2019, 199–204; HC4, 239–44. 36. Roy 1785, 387. 37. David Dundas’s evidence to Arrowsmith: NRS RH 1/2/523.



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38. ‘Sketch of the country between Guildford and Canterbury … 1755’ (K.Top.6.101) and ‘Survey and sketch of the coast from Whitstable to Northforeland … 1757’ (K.Top.16.31.1); Seymour 1980, 10–12. 39. Cleland 1829, 133; Scott 1868, 41. 40. Scott 1866, 127. Sime 1829, 127–30. At St Cuthbert’s, at the west end of Princes Street, the Georgian preaching box of the 1770s was again rebuilt in 1895. The Buccleuch Chapel, partly remodelled in 1866, is now the Orthodox Chapel of St Andrew, in Chapel Street. 41. TNA SP 44/193 ff. 330–1. 42. For instance, Journals of the House of Commons, 31 (1767), 61; 34 (1772–5) 18, 259, 408, 725. 43. Ramsden 1947, who says that the Sandbys lived at no. 38; the Survey of London has their address as no. 23. 44. DNB (C. Mould 2004); Wainwright 1982. 45. Sheppard 1963, 126–7. Of nos 32–5, only no. 35 survives. 46. NRS GD 364/2/208. Another copy of The Description, in the British Library (75.k.7), is dated 17 July 1765 (O’Donoghue 1977, 35, 38). The map, at an approximate scale of 1:200,000, is at K.Top.6.97. It was The Description that was sent to the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, in 1861 as a useful reference document in considering the options for the defence of the country at that time (Letter to Palmerston from William Jervois: Durham University Library Add. MSS 469–70). 47. NRS GD 364/2/208, 34, 35, 53. 48. NRS GD 364/2/208, 57–8, 61. 49. NRS GD 364/2/208, 84–143. This was written up nearly a year later and is dated 24 July 1766. 50. General Map of the South Part of Ireland, BL K.Top.51.30a–b. 51. NRS GD 364/2/208, 138–42. 52. Andrews 1966, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56. 53. For the text of the Treaty, see Corbett 2001, 641–50. 54. For the extensive correspondence about the work at Dunkirk, between William, General Conway, the Duke of Richmond and Colonel Desmaretz: TNA WO 124/1, f. 198–261. 55. Desmaretz, Frazer and Durnford sent to Dunkirk: TNA SP 44/138 f. 68, 194; SP 44/193 f. 282. For their brief biographies, see S. Hots, in Skempton et al. 2002, 179–80, 238–9 and 198–9. Frazer eventually took over from Desmaretz in Dunkirk when the latter died there in 1768; he later became Chief Engineer in Scotland, and married John Peter’s granddaughter, Charlotte. Durnford subsequently served in America, and was Chief Engineer at Chatham, but he spent most of his career providing the military infrastructure in Bermuda. 56. For Conway, DNB (Clive Towse 2004). For Richmond, see Olson 1961, 14–15, Reese 1987, 109, and Mackesy 1979.

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57. There are four large-scale and highly detailed plans and sections of the harbour works, together with a map of that part of French Flanders showing the drainage pattern and numerous spot-heights: TNA MR 1/203, 1–5. 58. From Conway to William, TNA 124/1, 231. To Richmond, TNA WO 124/1, 233; to Conway, TNA WO 124/1, 235; to James Hope, NRAS Hopetoun MSS, Bundle 590, quoted by Hodson 2007, 23. 59. TNA WO 124/1, 238–9. 60. TNA WO 124/1, 240–1. 61. Report of the British Engineers employed at Dunkirk: TNA WO 124/1, ff. 243–61. 62. TNA MR 1/203, 3. 63. TNA WO 124/1, 261; WO 124/6, 203; Olson 1961, 15, n3. An observer in 1778 recorded that the moles had been reduced to the level of the sands, so that the tides flowed over them at high water, but the harbour was not crippled. Dunkirk was described as ‘a free port, with a considerable share of trade as it is conveniently situated for smuggling goods into France, Flanders, England, and Holland …’, Gentleman’s Magazine 67 (1790), 40–3. 64. TNA WO 124/1, 241. 65. Konvitz 1987, 25. 66. Fortescue 1927, 328–34. 67. For the county maps, see the publications of J. B. Harley, especially Harley 1964 and 1965; Delano-Smith and Kain 1999, 49–111; and Macnair and Williamson 2010, 1–48. 68. Withers 2017, 51–64. 69. Wheeler 2018; Harley 1975, 105–29. William had used the one-inch scale before, e.g. in south-east England and for the map of the expedition to Einbeck in 1761: RCIN 733040. 70. The total was broadly comparable to the figure that Hugh Debbeig produced for a military survey of the harbours of North America: TNA CO 325/1, f. 200, quoted by Seymour 1980, 19, n56. 71. Royal Society archives: Minutes of Council, 29 July 1784. 72. TNA SP 44/193 ff. 377–8. The amount due to William, which Richmond signed off the next day, was £357. 73. Olson 1961, 4. 74. Caledonian Mercury, 21 May 1766. 75. Middlesex Journal, 24–6 October 1775. Major General Simon Fraser (1726–82), the Master of Lovat, was the son of the 11th Lord Lovat, the Jacobite leader. He had in fact raised a regiment (63rd) in 1757, and he did so again (71st) in October 1775 for service in America. DNB (Stuart Reid) 2010. 76. Scott 1866, 353; OSA, 17 (1796), 61–88; Annals, 1840, 415; Caledonian Mercury, 24 June 1766. The cause of death was not stated: Caledonian



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Mercury, 5 September 1767. All of James’s household goods, and the cow, were sold by auction on 7 October: Caledonian Mercury, 5 October 1767. The quotation is from Horace, Odes, 1.24, trans. C. E. Bennett, Loeb Classical Library, 1968. The Roman funerary formulae would have been very familiar to William – then immersed in the archaeology of Roman Scotland – from the writings of Gordon (1726), and of Horsley (1732). It seems highly likely that William would have also provided headstones for his parents, and for his sister, Susan, but the old churchyard at their home in Carluke has suffered great depredations and, if these memorials existed, they have not survived. 77. For instance, in 1778 he signed off a claim by some senior officers who had used coal instead of wood fuel (possibly at the camp at Coxheath) – author’s collection – and was asked by General Alexander Mackay, the Commander of the Forces in North Britain, for advice on the proper entitlement to rations when in camp: TNA OS 3/2. 78. TNA OS 3/2. For the Palace, see Colvin et al. 1976, 304–13. 79. Close 1969, 7. 80. O’Donoghue 1977, 39. 81. TNA SP 63/434 ff. 129–32, 190–1; SP 41/39 ff. 108–9; SP 63/436 f. 209. Roberts 1881, 543, 878, 890, 908. 82. Portsmouth, O’Donoghue 1977, 38; Jersey and Guernsey, Roberts 1889, nos 1193, 1195, 1338; magazines, NRS GD 224/687/5 ff. 30–3. 83. Leeds Intelligencer, 21 September 1773; TNA SP 78/290 ff. 40–3. William was too busy to go again in November and Colonel Bramham was sent instead: TNA SP 78/290 ff. 55–6. 84. Historical Manuscripts Commission 1904, 17; Roberts 1889, no. 1199. 85. Rogers 1977, 29–30; for the situation in 1776, see Close 1969, 9. 86. Brumwell 2012. 87. Fortescue 1902, 252. 88. For example, when local contractors failed to fulfil their obligations, in 1777, General Burgoyne faced a shortage of baggage animals, and the capture of a convoy in 1779 disrupted supplies: Fortescue 1902, 226, 275. 89. Among William’s papers is an extract from a letter from ‘Sir WE’ (Sir William Erskine, 1728–95) from Philadelphia in 1777, at the time of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga. Erskine was not optimistic of success in the war: TNA OS 3/2. William had probably known Erskine since the campaigns in Germany, and certainly visited him at his home at Torrie, in Fife, in 1771: Close 1969, 6, 9–10. Erskine was to be a signatory of William’s Will in 1786. 90. TNA OS 3/410; TNA 1/545/7–8. 91. Bannerman 2008, 31, 63, 105. 92. This letter was sold in lot 726 on 28 May 2020 by Dominic Winter Auctioneers, South Cerney, Gloucestershire. William’s declared

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accounts for America are in Roll 102 of the Auditors of the Imprest and Commissioners of Audit: TNA AO 1/495/102. 93. Bannerman 2008, 129; Gentleman’s Magazine, 81 (1811), 604. 94. Letter to Lord Liverpool: BL Add Ms 38213 f. 118. Estimate of probable expense of an extra feed: TNA OS 3/5. Contracts and profit: Bannerman 2008, 121–37. 95. Molleson 1783, 119–20, 137–8, 496. 96. Gazetteer & New Daily Advertiser, 29 September 1778. 97. TNA WO 46/10 ff. 158–9; Hodson 1991. 98. For the Instructions on reconnoitring and on surveying, see Appendix 2 and TNA OS 3/5, and Seymour 1980, 363–5. For the Company, see Porter 1889, 215. 99. Christie 1790. 100. BL Add MS 21732 f. 102; 21733 f. 96; 21079 f. 96. See also W. G. Godfey, ‘Glenie, James’ in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 5 (1801–20), Toronto, 1983. 101. Letter to Lord Amherst, 29 June 1778: NRS GD 224/687/5, ff. 30–3. 102. Fortescue 1902, 289–90. TNA OS 3/1. 103. Stamford Mercury, 3 June 1779. 104. See note 92. 105. Herbert 1967; Houlding 1981, 322–46. 106. Russell 1995, 33–7. 107. TNA WO 34/125 ff. 51–3, 99. In the end it seems that Tiptree was selected. For Danbury, see also Houlding 1981, 327. 108. Plan of Coxheath by John Burch and Thomas Bish: RCIN 734034.a. Diagram of Coxheath and Warley by T. Gilbert: RCIN 734034.b. Hodson 2020.

4 The Antiquary in the Field: Empathy with the Army of Rome

THE LONG WALK AND THE FORERUNNERS: GORDON AND HORSLEY What signifies that knowledge, say some, which brings no real advantage to  mankind? And what is it to anyone, whether the Roman walls pas’d this way or that? Or whether such a Roman inscription is to be read this  way  or  another? To this I would answer: there is that beauty and agreeableness in truth, even supposing it to be merely speculative, as always affords on the discovery of it real pleasure to a well-turned mind: and I will add, that it not only pleases, but enriches and cultivates it too.

T

hus John Horsley, a Dissenting minister, schoolmaster and scientist in Morpeth, Northumberland, who was a correspondent of Colin MacLaurin and of some of the most prominent antiquaries of the day: William Stukeley, Roger Gale and Sir John Clerk of Penicuik. Horsley was the author of one of the greatest of British archaeological books, Britannia Romana, published in 1732, in which it is clear that truth for Horsley was bound up with the accuracy of record. The second part of his book, in which he catalogued for the first time all of the inscriptions that had survived from Roman Britain, was for him the most important one and, he wrote, it was also the most expensive and tedious. Several thousand miles were travelled on this account, to visit ancient monuments, and re-examine them, where there was any doubt or difficulty. A short trial was sufficient to convince one how many originals had remained till then undiscovered, and how few had been published with due accuracy. And therefore I omitted no care nor pains that was necessary to copy these with the greatest exactness, which was the principle design of the work.

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He believed that this pursuit of irrefutable evidence was of cultural importance because ‘The youth in every polite nation are generally imployed in acquiring some skill in the Roman language, antiquities, and customs; and an acquaintance with these is supposed to be essentially necessary to a learned education.’1 This had certainly been the belief at Lanark Grammar School where William had worked his way through a full Classical curriculum and where he and his peers had had images of the past imprinted upon their imagination. Written only a few years before William’s schooldays, Horsley’s words might have been a manifesto for the Enlightenment, and it was this pervading national atmosphere in Scottish cultural life and education that receptive boys at the school had breathed in deeply. They were tacitly challenged to remove ‘any doubt or difficulty’ in understanding the world around them, and to do so by basing their views on evidence, even in matters relating to the distant past. William was to devote considerable time and effort to thinking about these things, so what provided the stimulus for his antiquarian pursuits? A curiosity about antiquity was probably sparked in his schooldays, and it is likely that some first-hand encounters with surviving archaeological remains allowed that spark of interest to smoulder, and then to become a flame that would consume his spare time for several years. Part of the answer may lie in his long walk round the coast of mainland Scotland during the Military Survey. The extent to which antiquities were depicted on the new map,2 varied from surveyor to surveyor, as Robert Melville was to discover in Strathmore. Throughout the eighteenth century, antiquarianism and cartography were comfortable bedfellows3 but the inclusion on the Great Map of information that was not strictly topographical was relatively rare. It was largely confined to marking the sites of modern battles (Killiecrankie, Glen Shiel and Falkirk, but not Culloden), although a small triumphalist note was permitted at the mouth of the Kyle of Tongue, in Sutherland: ‘Here the Hazard sloop was run ashore’, recalling the successful seizure of Jacobite gold and supplies in April 1746.4 Dozens of medieval castles were marked along the coast, whether they were still habitable or not; this was fully justified by their utility as points for personal navigation, by the imperative to consider whether each one occupied a position of strategic or tactical importance, and whether they could or should be refurbished for a garrison. On the coast of Moray, however, there was an archaeological site that would have been hard to ignore: this was the great promontory fort at Burghead, consisting of an enclosure on the summit and a larger



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Figure 4.1  The great promontory fort at Burghead, Moray, planned by William and included in The Military Antiquities. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 248, pl. xxxiii

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annexe on the lower ground to the north-east, three hectares in all. Three ramparts and three ditches cut the approach from the landward side, providing formidable defences for a settlement which seems to have been occupied from later prehistory until at least the ninth century ad. The Pictish carvings found there further underline its significance, suggesting the existence of a church and a burial ground.5 William’s plan of the earthworks on the headland (Figure 4.1), and the profile that he drew across the defences, form by far the best record of this exceptional site,6 most of which was levelled by the construction of the planned town and harbour there in the early years of the nineteenth century. This place can hardly have failed to fire his imagination and he certainly remembered it long afterwards when he was setting down his thoughts about the topography of Roman Scotland.7 Shortly afterwards, when the attention of the Military Survey turned to the mapping of southern Scotland, the brief seems to have been relaxed somewhat and, as a symptom of this, antiquities begin to be depicted more often. In the course of his survey along the coast from the Clyde to the Border in 1752, William depicted the large Iron Age promontory fort at Kemp’s Walk (‘Kemps Grave’) at Larbrax, to the north of Portpatrick in the Rhins of Galloway (Figure 2.7), but it was not until he got to the eastern shores of the Solway that the archaeological remains of the area frequently put in an appearance on the map. Near Ecclefechan, it seems that he could not resist the distinctive profile of the isolated hill of Burnswark, a green trapezium, which would have given him an extensive view8 of the coast and of the landward line of the Border. Crowned by a hillfort9 and flanked by the well-preserved earthworks of two Roman camps, Burnswark (Figure 4.2) had been a training ground for the Roman army in the use of light artillery. A visit there would have taken William close to the remains of the Roman fort at Birrens, only three miles away, and both of these sites seem to have been planned by him at this time or soon thereafter. The next task was Eskdale, immediately to the east. When writing his report10 to David Watson from Berwick on 20 September 1752, William outlined his progress since he left Dumfries on 15 August, but was perhaps being somewhat disingenuous in saying: As my orders were to proceed along the Border, I imagine that literally speak­ ing this should have been my route; but as we were to have the whole of the Esk except this small piece, I thought it was a pity to leave that undone, tho’ it really includes a little of Cumberland, yet without all doubt Esk was the ancient march. For this reason I surveyed up that river from the Green Ford, through a charming fertile valley, beautifully interspersed with wood on



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Figure 4.2  Burnswark, from The Military Antiquities. The atypical Roman camps on the flanks are well depicted. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 248, pl. xvi

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either side, to the foot of the River Liddel, which falls into Esk about 8 miles above the Green Ford.

It certainly made military sense to include all of the valley (Figure 2.8), which provided one of the natural routes across the Border, but, as it turned out, William spent rather more time there than was strictly necessary: he became caught up in examining some of the prominent ­archaeological sites, presumably because they could conceivably still have had some tactical importance. It was during this short excursus that he followed up the report of the discovery of the Roman bathhouse11 outside the fort at Netherby, mentioned in Chapter 2, and when he also planned the fine earthworks12 of the Norman ringwork-and-bailey castle known as Liddel Strength, a couple of miles upstream, perched on the crest of the river-cliff where the Liddel, a tributary of the Esk, forms the Border. Here we see evidence of the general lack, at that time, of a practical and robust classification of ancient earthworks, and perhaps of William’s inexperience in the analysis of the results of archaeological fieldwork. Even though the plan and the profiles that he produced are of his usual high standard, he classified Liddel Strength (‘Liddel Moat’) as a ‘Roman post’ – very much in line with the contemporary antiquarian tendency to see Romans everywhere. Other sites that he recorded during his long walk in the late summer of 1752 lay on the coast to the north of Berwick: these included the two contiguous D-shaped late prehistoric forts on the cliff edge at Earn’s Heugh, to the west of St Abb’s Head, and the simpler fort of Castle Dykes, north of Cockburnspath. It is less obvious quite when some of the other archaeological sites, further inland, were added to the Military Survey: the cluster of prehistoric enclosures to the west and southwest of Lockerbie seem to have been included when William recorded Burnswark and Birrens,13 but, farther east and north, the sudden scatter of hillforts in Lauderdale, around Oxton, and some of the sites in the Cheviots (including the Roman palimpsest at Chew Green) were probably surveyed by one or other of his colleagues. By the following year, 1753, when he surveyed the earthworks of the fort at Castledykes, near Lanark, William seems to have focused his personal interests upon Roman antiquities. The exact steps and sequences that led to this new enthusiasm are unknown, but the encounter with the baths at Netherby, and most probably with Burnswark and Birrens also, will inevitably have sent his imagination back to some of the texts of his Classical education: to Caesar’s Gallic Wars, with its account of the first invasion of Britain, and particularly to one short book by P. Cornelius



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Tacitus: De Vita Iulii Agricolae. This, usually referred as The Agricola, dealt in part with the first Roman invasion of Scotland, although with a lack of geographical precision that was tantalising; it was therefore an irresistible text for any antiquarian north of the Border. The events of the first century ad had a particularly strong attraction for Classically trained army officers, especially within the long debate about the extent and depth of Roman domination in Scotland.14 The general picture was clear enough: after the Roman army had landed on the south coast in AD 43 it had moved slowly northwards, quashing resistance or making alliances with the indigenous tribes. Forts were built in strategic locations for winter quarters and to house the new occupying garrison, and temporary camps were established wherever a unit stopped for the night on campaign or during bouts of training. The army was operating at the very end of its supply-lines, ‘beyond the ocean’, and so progress was slow and deliberate. By ad 72 or 73 (a date known from dendrochronology) it had reached Carlisle where a timber fort was constructed. At this point the push northwards was paused. When it was resumed, five years later, the army’s movements were hazily recorded for posterity by Tacitus in his laudatory but well-informed biography of his father-inlaw, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who had been appointed as Governor of Britain by the Emperor Vespasian, probably in ad 77, and who was to remain in Britain for seven years, an exceptionally long posting. After campaigns of subjugation in Wales and Northern England, he advanced into what is now Scotland, operating throughout the eastern Lowlands and in Galloway. In his sixth and seventh seasons (in the chronology envisaged by late twentieth-century scholarship), Agricola penetrated beyond the Forth-Clyde isthmus and up the eastern seaboard, flanking the Highlands. This advance culminated in the great battle between the Roman army and the native forces at Mons Graupius, the location of which is still elusive. This was a famous victory for Agricola, but the campaigning season that year was almost over, so he had to be content to take hostages and to send his supporting fleet on a reconnaissance round the northern tip of Britain. Early the next year, before any military operations could begin, Agricola’s term as Governor ended and he left for Rome.15 Tacitus’s account inevitably raised questions in the minds of Scottish antiquaries in the eighteenth century (questions which may also have been alluded to in classes at Lanark Grammar School): what route did Agricola take, how far north did he go, and where was the battle of Mons Graupius fought? William was therefore by no means the first to have consulted The Agricola and to have pondered its implications. In

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the 1720s, Alexander Gordon,16 an operatic tenor from Aberdeen who had performed in prestigious venues in Italy and in London, returned to Scotland, under the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke, to investigate the past of his native country. A nationalist antiquarian who (as he saw it) celebrated the Caledonian rejection of Rome, he had been stung by comments made by William Stukeley, the Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, that the Scots paid little attention to their archaeological heritage. Gordon set to work, collecting material about the activities of the Romans in Scotland, and in doing so he covered a great deal of ground. In 1726, the year in which William was born, he published Itinerarium Septentrionale: or a Journey thro’ most of the Counties of Scotland and those in the North of England.17 Unusually for the time, Gordon’s answers to the questions that had been posed were partly based on his own fieldwork. Something of Agricola’s route into ‘Caledonia’ could, he thought, be seen in the remains surviving in Dumfriesshire, at Burnswark and at Birrens. He also referred to Netherby, just within Cumberland, and to Tibbers Castle, a mediaeval (and earlier) castle on the Drumlanrig estate in Nithsdale, much farther inland.18 An oblique reference, to ‘another square fort like that at Middlebe’ [Birrens] that he had not seen, may have been a reference to the prominent earthworks at Castle O’er, on the spur between the White Esk and the Black, 16 km to the north of Burnswark.19 It is striking that it is these same sites to which William gave special attention in his own fieldwork and in his eventual publication. It is likely therefore that he had read Gordon’s book at a relatively early stage, possibly even before his walk from the Clyde to the Border in 1752. In the spirit of the age, Gordon was keen to verify and quantify evidence in the field. As an Aberdonian, familiar with the lowlands of the north-east coast, he probably had a wider view than some of his contemporaries of the various possible routes to the North that might have been taken by Agricola, and that knowledge took him into Strathmore. He believed – wrongly as it turned out – that there were no Roman camps in the Mearns between Montrose and Stonehaven, so he was not convinced that the imperial army had penetrated that far. He preferred, rather, to place Mons Graupius at Dalginross, just outside Comrie, in Perthshire, where he recorded a Roman fort and a temporary camp (Figure 4.3). He conscientiously measured, by double paces of 5 feet, the dimensions of the sites that he visited, and he tried to give an impression of them in the plans that he published. However, he was  not a surveyor and, despite his artistic ability (at some points in his varied career he had taught drawing), his plans are



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Figure 4.3  Alexander Gordon’s highly stylised and ‘corrected’ plan of the Roman fort (left) and the large camp at Dalginross, Perthshire (Gordon 1726, pl. 5); cf. Figure 4.11 (photo: Adam Welfare)

of little use as objective records because he neatened them into idealised representations.20 Following closely behind Gordon, but contributing very much more new and reliable material, John Horsley was also conscientious in collecting material for his Britannia Romana, but in a different way. Although his primary focus was on the preparation of a corpus of inscriptions, he was careful to employ his assistant, George Mark, to survey the position and course of Hadrian’s Wall and of the Antonine Wall, even though the forts strung out along the walls were given rather less attention, being only accorded sketched plans.21 Like Gordon, he concentrated almost exclusively on the permanent installations rather than on the temporary camps, although in his account of Hadrian’s Wall22 he did mention two of the latter: Watchclose, which he thought was a fort, and Brown Dikes which was ‘as large as the fort at Carrawburgh, and has probably been for exploration, or the aestiva [summer camp] of the fort’. Farther north, in a geography that was less familiar to him, Horsley’s account

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Figure 4.4 John Horsley’s published plan of Dalginross (Horsley 1732, pl. opp. p. 44), based on broadly correct measurements but with the wrong points joined; cf. Figure 4.11

of Agricola’s northern campaigns is quite brief. Apart from a comment that Tacitus’s narrative suggested that the battle of Mons Graupius took place further beyond the Tay than Dalginross, the location that Gordon had suggested, he offered no opinions. He had almost certainly not visited that part of Scotland, and it is implausible that he had ever been to Dalginross for the plan that he published of the fort and the camp there (Figure 4.4) is a bizarre distortion of reality, drawn up from someone else’s measurements.23 THE BEGINNING OF FIELD ARCHAEOLOGY AND CAPTAIN MELVILLE’S QUEST

As William was to write later,24 the problem that both Gordon and Horsley had in seeking to understand Tacitus and to identify and analyse any surviving remains, was that neither of them had any military experience. That the principles of war are fixed and general, varying only with the local circumstances and situation of the country, we doubt not will be admitted:



The Antiquary in the Field 125 whence it follows that some knowledge of modern military operations seems necessary, to enable us to trace with success the motions of a Roman army; and whoever has been accustomed to observe the one with most attention, will, in all likelihood, not only find it easiest to trace the other, but, at the same time, will perceive a very great resemblance in the leading principles upon which they respectively acted. With regard, then, to military antiquities, it seems to have been a misfortune, that few of the commentators who have treated on this subject, however well qualified in other respects, have been military men.

The want was about to be supplied. In 1753, William, still working in the Military Survey, but now in the Lowlands, turned his attention to a site only 5 km from his mother’s house in Lanark, the Roman fort at Castledykes (Figure 4.5), close to the Clyde near Carstairs. This had been briefly mentioned by Horsley as ‘a large square encampment where the ruins of the buildings are to be seen, and urns and coins have been found. It is a very large fort and the ruins very considerable, and a grand military way passes close by it.’25 William may have known of Castledykes all his life, but his eagerness to record it after his experiences in Dumfriesshire may suggest that he had now read Britannia Romana and that the temptation was irresistible. The contrast between his survey26 and the plans of sites elsewhere that had been published by his predecessors was dramatic. The defences of the fort that he drew at Castledykes consisted of a rampart and an outer ditch, with suggestions of a counterscarp bank beyond that. He showed the gap that marked the position of the north gate and (by implication from the course of the contemporary track) the gates to the east and west, which were offset to the south of the centre. The southern perimeter of the fort was positioned on the crest of a scarp, depicted by the broad brush-strokes normal in the Military Survey and, importantly, he drew (though schematically) all of the cultivation in the interior and outside the defences. This gives an important indication of the survival of the earthworks at that time and how they might be interpreted. He evidently had a clear understanding of what the site would have looked like originally – further evidence of his recent reading – but he was content to show it as he found it, and to do so within its context. As a concession to the scale – the plan was eventually reproduced at 200 feet to the inch – he used simple conventions to depict and to differentiate the ditch and the bank, and the dimensions that he recorded were accurate. This field record was a significant departure. Although the first deliberate survey of archaeological earthworks in Britain may have been made by John Aubrey at Avebury in 1649, this method of elucidating archaeological information

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Figure 4.5  William’s plan of the Roman fort at Castledykes for The Military Antiquities, showing its topographical position, the four gates, the erosion of the defences and the cultivation of the interior. The contextual map below includes the Roman camp at Cleghorn (top centre), the estate at Lee (top left), and Lanark Bridge and Carmichael (bottom right) where William was to make barometric observations in 1774. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 248, pl. xxvii



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was not followed up with any frequency during the following century, nor with much pretence at accuracy. William’s dispassionate, clear and honest depiction of Castledykes therefore marks a huge step forward in the history and practice of field archaeology. O. G. S. Crawford, the first Archaeology Officer in the Ordnance Survey, appointed in 1920, considered that ‘modern field archaeology began with General Roy’.27 William was still only twenty-seven; he was young, confident and energetic, and now he was fired with the all-consuming curiosity that is the fuel of sustained research. The trigger for his next venture came with the arrival on the scene of another soldier, Robert Melville, who had been born in Monimail, near Cupar in Fife, in 1723, the son of the minister. He studied medicine in the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, but rather then graduating he had purchased a commission as an Ensign in the 25th Regiment of Foot in 1744, being present at Culloden and then serving in Flanders and in Ireland. In the early summer of 1754 Captain Melville, as he then was, embarked on a walking tour28 with two of the sons of the lawyer, politician and antiquary, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik: John Clerk (later, of Eldin), who was a close friend of Paul Sandby, and Matthew, a brother officer in the 25th who became an Engineer.29 Their route took them along the Antonine Wall, where they examined several of the Roman forts, and then north to Fort William, Fort George, south to Montrose, and through Angus and Perthshire. After seeing the remains of the Antonine Wall they had ‘been very inquisitive on the subject of military antiquities’ throughout their tour, but until they visited the Roman fort and camp at Dalginross, which had been described by both Gordon and by Horsley, they found nothing to satisfy their curiosity.30 Like William, Robert had had a Classical education, at Leven Grammar School, and once back in Edinburgh after the tour he undertook ‘an attentive perusal’ of The Agricola. In his mind’s eye he reconstructed the movements of the Roman army during that last season of the Governor’s campaign, and he concluded that the troops had marched through Strathmore into what became Kincardineshire, the country that he and his companions had just travelled through in the other direction. He inferred that the remains of the army’s camps might still survive in uncultivated areas there, but he found no indication of this in the books by Gordon or by his predecessor Sir Robert Sibbald who had first ignited the study of The Agricola.31 Not having found from them the smallest hints for the belief that any such camps existed, or that the last battle of Agricola against the Caledonians had happened beyond the Tay, near the eastern part of the Grampian

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Mountains, he [Melville] made his next inquiry of the particular engineer who he understood had just surveyed all that part of the country for the general map of Scotland then in course of execution by order of government, but had the mortification to learn from him, that although he had been very desirous, according to directions received, to observe and delineate all traces whatever of entrenchments, or other military works, yet he had seen none, and indeed was positive that none did then exist of a rectangular and Roman-like form.32

In Britain, the ‘Roman-like form’ of a military camp was indeed usually a rectangle, of varying size and proportions, with rounded corners: a playing-card shape.33 Although many were reused time and again, these encampments were essentially temporary, being established for as little as a single night or for as long as a full season of manoeuvres and training. If they have not been levelled by cultivation, what survives on the surface are the simple defences of the perimeter: a low bank (rarely more than a metre high, and usually much less) made of turf and earth, scraped up from an external ditch that was sometimes tidily cut but which often was little more than a rough linear quarry. These earthworks were broken by simple gaps for gates, most often placed in the centre of each side but (especially in more elongated examples) frequently offset in pairs opposite each other. The position of the gates reflected that of the streets between the lines of leather tents that were pitched within the interior. Each gate was defended from a direct assault by a short length of bank and ditch (known as a traverse; in Latin, titulus) set just outside it, or, more rarely, by curving earthworks within the area of the gate itself that performed the same function. It was these distinctive design traits – somewhat obscurely described in the surviving Roman military manuals – that Robert Melville was looking for. Either of the Clerk brothers would have been in a position to put Melville in touch with William and his colleagues in the Military Survey to ask whether they had found any Roman camps. The Engineer who had surveyed Strathmore had indeed been directed to record military antiquities but had failed to find them. He was not named and the only clues to his identity are that Melville, recalling his experiences to Richard Gough more than thirty years later, excused the Engineer’s failure by explaining that he was a native of Jersey or Guernsey and, by implication, could not be expected to know about these things; he added that he had died soon afterwards. This may have been a jumbled memory or a scrambled record, but it suggests that it was John Manson who worked in Strathmore as he had a link to the Channel Islands (he was posted there a year later) and seems not to be recorded after 1757.



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Despite drawing a blank with the Survey, Melville was not put off. In the early August of 1754 he went to stay in Angus with General the Earl of Panmure (to whom he was appointed as aide-de-camp), but his enquiries produced no leads until a neighbouring landowner, Erskine of Kirkbuddo, told him about some earthworks called The Harefaulds on a heath near his home, between Forfar and Carnoustie. On the next day, Melville visited the site and ‘to his great joy found, very visible, the greatest part of a vallum and ditch, with gates of the usual breadth of a street in a Roman camp, and each of them covered by a fit traverse or breast work, quite observable’. Unusually, the earthworks of the Roman camp at Kirkbuddo (Figure 4.6) had been noted in the early seventeenth century by Commissary Maul, but the reference, quoted without comment by Alexander Gordon, is hopelessly garbled. To be recorded at such an early date the earthworks must have been clear and striking, but since the eighteenth century the defences have been almost completely levelled by ploughing, except in a wood at the southern end. The site encloses nearly 25 hectares and there were six of the gates that so delighted Robert Melville: one in each of the short sides and two in the north-eastern and south-western sides.34 Two days later, spurred by his discovery, Melville left Panmure early in the morning on horseback, ‘attended only by a servant’ and later by a very sceptical Mr Mollison of Brechin. The challenge that he faced was to predict where the next camp might be. Any force of i­nfantry – and the Roman army would have been no exception – would move about 15 miles a day, so Melville rode north-eastwards and at Keithock, just beyond Brechin, at exactly that distance from Kirkbuddo, he found the fragmentary remains (Figure 4.6) of another, very similar, camp35 between the roads to Edzell and Laurencekirk. Melville knew that he did not have the time to go farther eastwards so he turned west down Strathmore and, after only a couple of hours, at Battledykes, near Oathlaw, he found a third camp, much larger and better preserved than the other two.36 His excitement, satisfaction and sense of vindication must have been immense: this cycle of prediction and discovery is one of the most exciting things that can happen to any field archaeologist, and it occurs only rarely in any career. Melville ‘had got his eye in’; more than that, he intuitively understood the factors that the Roman quartermasters had taken into account in choosing the best positions for their camps, so that he, like them, could spot a good location some distance away. He dined with a friend at Kirriemuir and then rode the target distance south-westwards, staying the night at Coupar Angus. The next morning

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Figure 4.6  The Roman camps in Strathmore discovered by Robert Melville and planned by William: Keithock, Kirkbuddo and Lintrose. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 248, pl. xiv



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he explored the area around the town and on the south side, at Lintrose, there were the earthworks of a fourth camp,37 of much the same size as those at Kirkbuddo and Keithock (Figure 4.6). Melville now wished, ideally, to explore the next set of possible locations, on the west bank of the Tay, above Scone, and then around the well-known Roman fort at Ardoch, between Auchterarder and Dunblane. However, he had an appointment in Fife, so he had to tear himself away. Back in Edinburgh, he sent his rough sketches of his discoveries and the notes that he had made to William (‘my first proselyte’), apparently the only person who had believed in his quest.38 Although he was credited with the discovery, shortly afterwards, of the very large and irregular camp at Channelkirk, at the head of Lauderdale, Melville never had the opportunity to resume his fieldwork in Strathmore.39 His next posting was to a landscape very different from eastern Scotland: to the West Indies with the 38th Regiment, and a spell as temporary Governor of Guadeloupe. Then, after the Treaty of Paris, he became Governor of the islands that had been ceded from France to Britain (Dominica, Grenada, The Grenadines, St Vincent and Tobago) and he did not finally return from the Caribbean until 1771. Once back in Britain he dusted off and published a short book on the organisation, structure and complement of the Roman Legion, and in 1774 he took a house at 25 Great Pulteney Street, about ten doors up from William, allowing them to renew their conversations about antiquities.40 THE SUMMER OF 1755: STRATHMORE AND THE ANTONINE WALL

When William received Robert Melville’s account of what he had found in Strathmore it was a revelation. In the Military Survey the earthworks of any well-preserved Roman fort – the permanent bases of the garrison, the ‘castra stativa’ – had been faithfully recorded wherever they were a significant feature in the landscape. The justification for this was not simply a matter of orientation for the map user, although that would have been reason enough; it was, in William’s words, that the location of ‘an advantageous post when the Romans were carrying on their military operations in Britain, must, in all essential respects, continue to be a good one now’. Further, although by this time William had almost certainly seen the defences of the (atypical) Roman camps at Burnswark (Figure 4.2), he was clearly stunned that the relatively insubstantial defences of temporary camps could still be seen. Such sites had not been identified elsewhere in the Empire and their survival

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in northern Britain was ‘truly singular and seems almost incredible … it was supposed impossible that they could have lasted till now, and therefore were not sought for’.41 Armed with Melville’s sketches and notes, he now needed, for his own satisfaction, to see these extraordinary survivals and, most importantly, to record them in their context. The timing was propitious: these were the closing stages of the Military Survey, when the map of the Highlands was complete and most of the field-sheets covering the Lowlands were also in the bag, but, even so, there was not to be much time. In America and in Europe the events that would lead to the Seven Years War had begun; with tension rising and an increased fear of invasion, the Engineers would soon be needed in the south. In the interim, David Watson was busy with the annexed estates, still clearing up after the Jacobite rebellion, and William, left in charge of the Survey, was probably awaiting new orders.42 The summer of 1755 was spent, as usual, in the field but the tasks were not the normal ones. Although antiquities, broadly defined, were not a central element in the brief of the Military Survey, there seems to have been some consensus that earlier military sites would be included if they occupied positions offering strategic or tactical potential. In that respect, the survey in Strathmore had been found wanting, and this may have been the justification for William’s fieldwork now. He surveyed Melville’s sites at Battledykes, Keithock, Kirkbuddo and Lintrose (Figure 4.6) and he found that their degree of preservation varied. The bank and ditch that formed the perimeter of the camp at Kirkbuddo was almost intact, but cultivation had levelled and obscured the interior at Battledykes, and at Lintrose about a quarter of the defences had been destroyed in this way. At Keithock, the site was already almost completely levelled: only the north-west corner survived. William’s careful surveys were therefore timely; agricultural improvement was coming, and although Kirkbuddo survived in part until the Second World War, the others succumbed to the plough in the nineteenth century. In his plans he did not confine himself to the Roman earthworks: he showed details of the current land use – cultivation or moor – and the significant natural slopes, the placenames, roads and tracks, buildings, burns and pools, avenues and woodland, and other features. Because of the scale of the plans, and the slight nature of the defences, the rampart and ditch of each camp were depicted as a stylised convention – three lines, the central one being broader than the other two; this was reduced to a single line where preservation was less good and to a dashed line where the course of the perimeter could be inferred but not depicted. In the history of field



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archaeology, these were the two great changes that William introduced in a consistent way: the depiction of a site as it survived in its landscape context, combining this with the use of a convention to convey detail in a simplified way.43 The close examination that was needed to survey these sites – ­measuring them, point by point, noting every change – would have attuned him to the topographical choices that the Roman surveyors had made, and to the form and character of the camps themselves. Having absorbed and tested this by repeated acquaintance, his understanding would have become intuitive; he had achieved empathy with his predecessors, and this would have given him confidence that he could identify other likely sites elsewhere. And that is exactly what he did next. Moving south-westwards, beyond Perth and Strathearn, into Strathallan, in July he re-examined the well-known Roman fort at Ardoch, near Braco (Figure 4.7). The complex defences there – still impressive, even today – indicated that the site had a long history, occupying a pivotal position in Roman Scotland. Here, in the gently undulating countryside to the north of the fort, William identified the remains of two overlapping camps, large and small, in a landscape that was already partly cultivated.44 Their overlap presented William with a challenge but he deduced from his examination of the earthworks at the intersection that the smaller camp was later than the larger, although, if so, he was puzzled that the earlier earthworks had not been levelled when the smaller site was constructed and occupied.45 He commented rather severely that it would have ‘deranged entirely the interior order and regularity of their encampment’. He also voiced further professional disapproval in that ‘part of the ground included within the smaller camp is at present of a morassy nature, and such as now-a-days we should think very improper for troops to camp upon’.46 Observations such as these were to be of relevance when, some years later, he came to think seriously about the design of the camps and the holding capacity of each one – the key that might unlock the history of the campaigns of the army in Roman Scotland. The sites that he surveyed in the summer of 1755 are sizable. The camp  at Battledykes and the larger one at Ardoch are almost identical,  each measuring about 880 m by 600 m and occupying an area of  just over 50 hectares; the landscape contexts in which they are set in William’s watercolour plans are even more extensive, amounting to  about 160 hectares at Ardoch. In recording them, William almost ­certainly did not work alone, although in this project – a personal initiative, but officially sanctioned – he may not have had the full team of six

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Figure 4.7  The complex defences of the second-century fort at Ardoch, with an angular annex to the north, and two of the four overlapping camps now known. © The British Library Board, K.Top.50.79.2



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that had been employed in each area of the Highlands. Nevertheless, these were accurate surveys or ‘plans,’ a category which he was always diligent to distinguish from the ‘sketches’ of sites and landscapes that he opportunistically made (using pacing and probably a circumferentor) in the course of journeys on other business.47 The work in Strathmore and at Ardoch must enabled him to understand much more clearly the deficiencies in the maps and plans of Roman antiquities that had been published by his predecessors, and it will have brought home to William the differing interests and priorities between himself and his colleagues in the Military Survey. He must have realised that his opportunities to rectify any shortfalls or omissions were becoming limited. One particular shortfall was the inconsistent mapping of the largest complex of Roman structures in Scotland, the second-century frontier between the Forth and the Clyde, now known as the Antonine Wall. Stretches of this had been allocated to different people and ‘it was therefore judged proper, in 1755, to survey accurately the line of this old entrenchment, by running a suite of stations along its whole course’. William also wished to provide more accurate drawings of the Roman forts along the wall; these had been ‘only slightly sketched’ by his colleagues, and on comparing the plans given by Gordon and by Horsley ‘there seemed to be … much room for improvement’.48 This was no mean task, although in the context of the Military Survey it was entirely manageable. The north-western boundary of the Roman Empire had been fixed by the construction of Hadrian’s Wall in the 120s, but less than a generation later the Emperor Antoninus Pius, who succeeded Hadrian in 138, pushed farther north, perhaps to quell trouble in the area between the Tyne and the Forth. This ‘Antonine Wall,’ which was probably completed by about ad 143 or 144, was a new hard border about 60 kilometres long, driven across the narrowest neck of Scotland between the Forth and the Clyde, keeping to the forward edge of the high ground wherever possible to make best use of the defensive potential of the topography. The Wall was a continuous steep-sided rampart, built mainly of turf and earth, on a base of stone rubble. In front of it (thus, on the northern side) was a broad ditch, the material from which was thrown forward as an outer mound that tapered in thickness; by steepening the northern scarp of the ditch this mound would have had the effect of making it all even more of an obstacle. Attached to the south side of the Wall, at intervals of about 3.5 km, were at least seventeen forts, most of which had an annexe which protected a regimental bathhouse and essential industrial activity. Nine,

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smaller, fortlets are known to been constructed between the forts. A road – the ‘Military Way’ – much of which was still visible in the 1750s behind the line of the Wall, linked all of these garrisons. Some earlier attempts had been made to survey the Wall. Timothy Pont had undertaken fieldwork in the 1580s and 1590s and John Adair, who had produced a plan of the Roman fort at Ardoch in 1682, advertised his intention to publish two sheets that would show the course of the remains across the isthmus and some of the associated detail, but nothing came of it.49 In considering the topographical records of the Wall that had been made by his predecessors, Gordon and Horsley,50 William was right that there was certainly much room for improvement. Even though Alexander Gordon had started with high aspirations, he was unable to follow through on his grand plan for a major survey of the frontier, which was to be published in six sheets, apparently at a scale of about two miles to the inch. He had done the fieldwork, ‘with a mathematical instrument’ and had measured the course of the Wall with ‘a Gunter-chain, the whole way, from sea to sea’. In an advertisement at the end of the Itinerarium Septentrionale, Gordon announced his bold intention to publish a compleat view of the Roman Walls in Britain, viz. those of the Emperors Hadrian and Severus, in Cumberland, and Northumberland, in a large map, near 14 foot in length, and six in breadth: and that of Antoninus Pius in Scotland, in another map of about 6 foot in length, and 4 in breadth. The chief design of this undertaking is to present the publick with such draughts of these stupendous works as may hand down to posterity their true image and representation, as taken by an actual geometrical survey of both, last summer, with great labour, and expense. It is here proposed that these Walls shall be represented as they really appear on the ground.

His maps were to have all sorts of embellishments and illustrations and would be accompanied by ‘a large dissertation in English, and in Latin for the use of foreigners’. It was all very commendable, but either he had misjudged the market, and no subscribers came forward, or, perhaps more likely, he was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task, especially as he did his own surveying, drawing and engraving. In the end, the only map that he published of the Antonine Wall was in the Itinerarium, which even he described as ‘an imperfect and diminutive sketch … which serves only to point out its situation’, and his plans of the forts – although carefully paced out, no doubt – are only stylised representations in which the use of the ruler and a template for curves is all too evident.51



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In contrast, John Horsley did not work alone; he had the support of George Mark, who was probably his assistant at his school in Morpeth, and who surveyed the courses of both Walls for his employer. To map Hadrian’s Wall, Mark had used 164 survey stations – at average intervals of about half a mile, a density that is very similar to the intervals that William had determined around the coast of Scotland – and it is likely that the same (not very accurate) specification was adopted for both Walls. As a result, Horsley published an overview map of the Antonine Wall at a scale of one inch to ten miles, and four full-page sheets at about 1.3 inches to a mile. These sheets were embellished with thumbnail sketched plans – they seem to be little more than that – of the ten forts that he knew along the line of the frontier.52 Whilst acknowledging that the Britannia Romana had been ‘executed with much care and judgement’, and had corrected some of Gordon’s mistakes, William was equally critical of Horsley’s maps because they included ‘but little of the adjacent country and represent[ed] none of the ground on either side, which, in order to show the intent and use of a military work, seems essentially necessary’. Further, in the placing one of the forts (at Camelon, near Falkirk: Figure 4.8) on the line of the Antonine Wall rather than to the north of it, and not checking it on the ground in person, Horsley had relied upon the reports of others, something that he, William, was extremely loath to do.53 His criticisms of others, as in this instance, were always gentle, and seemed to be offered in puzzlement as if he could not understand why they had accepted their own shortcomings. To be fair to Gordon and Horsley, William had the great advantages that he was a surveyor of several years standing, and he had an experienced team to back him up, but still the vision, direction and depiction fell to him, along with the determination to get the survey finished. In its final published form, which appeared within his posthumous folio volume, The Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain, William’s map of the Antonine Wall was an enormous engraved plate (Figure 4.9), measuring 164 cm by 50 cm.54 It has a suitably long title: ‘Plan shewing the course of the Roman Wall called Grime’s Dyke raised along the isthmus between the Forth and the Clyde in the reign of Antoninus by Lollius Urbicus then commanding the Roman forces in Britain, together with plans of those stations belonging to the Wall whose vestiges do yet exist. Surveyed in 1755.’ More than half of the area of the plate was devoted to large-scale plans of the ten forts then known, together with profiles across some of them. There was also a plan and section, taken to the east of the fort at Rough Castle, which

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Figure 4.8  Part of the Antonine Wall, surveyed in 1755, with, to the north, the Roman fort at Camelon, established in the late first century, long before the wall. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 248, pl. xxix



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illustrated the principal linear elements of the frontier works: the military way, rampart, berm, ditch and upcast mound.55 The overall map of the Wall is presented in a developed form of that used in the Military Survey, being at the same scale, showing the relief, generalised areas of cultivation, roads and settlements, notable houses and their policies, rivers, bogs, lochs and woodland. The site of the Battle of Falkirk, in 1746, is marked, a reminder that this area could be one of confrontation (as it had also been in the War of Independence in 1298), justifying William’s thesis that the Roman defences here merited more detailed attention because of their continuing relevance. He noted, approvingly, that many of the topographical choices that the Romans had made were ‘consonant to the modern practice’.56 Each surviving stretch of the Antonine Wall itself is shown on William’s map as a narrow, hatched band which is reduced to parallel dashed lines where its course was less clear or was inferred. The plans of the forts are simplified and are almost reduced to symbols, but all of this is a huge improvement on the depiction of the same area on the Military Survey in which the Wall appeared as a generalised line which changes in style, and on which the forts were inconsistently included. One of the most striking features of William’s survey is his depiction of the rural character of the central belt of Scotland at that time, especially where the extent and density of the modern built-up areas around Bearsden, Kirkintilloch and Falkirk can make it difficult to navigate between William’s map and our contemporary ones. He captured the archaeology and context of the Wall just before the advent of agricultural improvement, so destructive to the ancient earthworks, and before the development of the coalfield and the associated industries. To the north of Falkirk, beside the River Carron, a single label – ‘Carron Iron Work’ [sic] – signposts the industrial revolution that was to utterly transform the central belt of Scotland. This was to be the great manufactory that made, among many other things, the light ‘carronade’ canons that had been invented by Robert Melville after he left for the West Indies.57 Although William’s conscientious recording of the Wall before this maelstrom of change was largely a matter of historical luck, it is, nevertheless, an important part of the continuing value of his survey. As a measure of this, it is enough to say that the index of Sir George Macdonald’s magisterial 492-page account of the whole frontier, published in 1934, has an entry which says simply: ‘Roy, General, 79; his Military Antiquities cited, passim.’ Every publication on the Antonine Wall still refers to William’s map and site-plans because they have been found to be reliable, even though in some cases, such as that of the levelled fort and fortlet on Castlehill (Figure 4.9), to

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Figure 4.9  The west end of William’s survey of the Antonine Wall (about one-sixth of the whole), with two of his ten sketch-plans of forts along the frontier. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 248, pl. xxxv

the west of Bearsden, modern research and remote-sensing technology have been required to confirm the accuracy of his observations.58 The forts were straightforward subjects for survey and may have been recorded by William alone. The plans of them, presented at a scale of about 1:1200, show the immediate topography; the rampart and ditch of the Wall itself; the earthwork defences and internal features



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of the forts and their annexes; and the Military Way. Contemporary detail, such as the farm buildings at Balmuildy, was also depicted and now forms an important source of evidence for the extent of probable disturbance to the archaeological levels. Typically, in considering the forts, William was interested in the numbers: he calculated the mean distance between them as being ‘three thousand, five hundred and fifty-four and a half yards’ – almost exactly two miles. Although he had recorded ten of them, he inferred from this spacing that there had been nineteen in all; the current total identified stands at seventeen. As a quartermaster, he was also keen to understand their capacity – how many troops they might have held – and, by using the evidence from the surviving inscriptions, to see how the construction work had been allocated between the three Legions involved, the Second, Sixth and Twentieth.59 William evidently considered that the survey of the Wall, and the plans of the forts, were enough for the reader to understand the remains of the frontier and that, in consequence, a short textual description would suffice.60 Although his survey work had proceeded from east to west, he tried to facilitate comparison with Gordon and Horsley by aligning his text to theirs and describing the remains from west to east. His is clearly a first-hand account, and he must have walked the whole length again in this other direction to put it together, probably in 1769 when he was certainly back on the Wall. The result allows the reader to interpret the map at another level, especially in the subtle variations of condition and survival along the way. He was, however, at something of a disadvantage in seeking to understand what he was looking at. His genius lay in careful observation and in the appreciation of context, but he was diagnosing from the surface, without the knowledge that could be gained from examining what lay under the ground: systematic excavation as a means of understanding the structure of earthworks would not be devised for another decade, partly through the work of another Engineer with a curiosity about antiquity.61 As a consequence, William could not appreciate the effort that had been expended in constructing the Wall of turf and he downplayed the significance of the rampart; it was, after all, the remains of the (much more obvious) ditch that he had followed in tracing the course of the frontier defences across the isthmus. Although consistently referring to the Antonine Wall as just that – a wall – William thought that the magnitude of the ditch must have constituted the principal defence; the rampart, with its parapet, as far as can be discerned from the imperfect

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remains of them, seeming everywhere to have been slight and inconsiderable. Thus the superior part of the work [the wall] requiring but a small quantity of earth for its construction, it became absolutely necessary, in order to obtain so great a ditch, to throw a large proportion of the earth northwards … thereby rendering the natural glacis somewhat steeper … the same method is practised in the field works of the moderns.62

His observations were accurate enough, but it was not until the 1890s that systematic programmes of excavation along the Wall were to clarify the true nature of the frontier’s remains.63 THE REVIVAL OF A DORMANT PASSION

In the build-up to the Seven Years War, William had to leave the Antonine Wall and join His Majesty’s forces: his attention being necessarily called to the observance of the actual manoeuvres of modern armies, instead of endeavouring to investigate those of the ancients. For the space of eight years, from 1755 to 1764, no opportunity offered of resuming the inquiry into this branch of antiquity which was now in a great degree forgotten.64

That is what a good officer should say, and it was probably largely true,  but he evidently found the attraction of at least one major archaeological site impossible to resist. In February 1757, little more than a year after his arrival in the south of England, William made an accurate survey of the archetypal British Iron Age hillfort: Maiden Castle, just outside Dorchester in Dorset (Figure 4.10). The fort had been occupied throughout the Iron Age as a proto-urban settlement, and it is possible that there may, subsequently, have been a Roman military post there also. What is less clear is why he surveyed the site at all; could the eighteenth-century army ever have envisaged this as a redoubt that could be defended in the event of an invading force arriving in Weymouth Bay? It seems unlikely, but not inconceivable. Equally uncertain is the question of whether this adventure, like that along the Antonine Wall, had some official sanction, and thus appropriate resources. Either way, it was no mean undertaking, especially with eighteenth-century instruments: the massive and complex earthworks measure more than 1000 m by 500 m, and any surveyor working there faces significant problems with intervisibility because the defences contain a considerable amount of dead ground. The plan that he produced was an extremely good one which captured almost all of the available detail; he even recorded, though without comment,



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Figure 4.10  The great hillfort of Maiden Castle, in Dorset, an icon of the British Iron Age, as planned by William in 1757. © The British Library Board, K.Top.12.20

the internal scarps that twentieth-century e­ xcavations proved to mark the degraded western edge of the much earlier Neolithic causewayed enclosure within the interior.65 In the years that followed, spent in Germany, there would be little opportunity for such fieldwork, although an unsigned survey,66 ascribed to William on stylistic grounds, does go out of its way to show the three enclosing walls of the huge, 90-hectare Iron Age hillfort on the Dünsberg at Fellingshausen, near Giessen in Hesse. Though rather different in character, this vast prehistoric fortification may have reminded him of Maiden Castle and the world that he had left. Otherwise, even though there will have been no leisure to indulge in archaeology, these years will have provided William with ample time to learn the military craft and to reflect on the parallel experience of armies throughout history. After the war ended, in 1763, with his investigative imagination fortified by his active service, his old interests were to be triggered once more. In September 1764 William had gone back to Lanark to see his family. It had been a long absence. During the Military Survey, and

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s­ ubsequently, William managed to follow and to note all of the Roman roads that connected Hadrian’s Wall to the Antonine Wall; in his account of the roads through his own home ground in Clydesdale (Figure 4.5), he mentions a clutch of minor placenames, reciting them with evident affection as he describes the remains that he could trace down the river valley. The road having passed through the enclosures at Lockhart-hall, then enters the station called Castledykes, beautifully situated on the bank above the Clyde; and leaving Renstruther on the right, proceeds to Cleghorn-mill where it has passed the river Mouss. Thence it has led through the inclosures of Cleghorn, leaving Agricola’s camp on the right, and so on by Collylow, Kilcadzow, Coldstream, and Eildshields, to Belstone, near Carluke, known all along by the name of the Watling-street.67

It seems likely that it was on one of these road-tracing expeditions that, informed by his experience of surveying the camps that Melville had found in Strathmore, he stumbled upon the defences of ‘Agricola’s camp’ at Cleghorn, close to where the Roman road down Clydesdale made its easiest crossing of the Mouse Water. Well-preserved as an earthwork, but rather smaller than the examples that he had examined in Angus, the excitement of the discovery of this unknown camp provided an additional impetus to a revival of William’s passion for antiquity.68 He began to plan the writing of two short essays: one on the Roman system of castrametation – the design of military camps – and another on the route taken by Agricola in his march northwards into Caledonia. In the nature of these things, as he freely admitted, these two very manageable projects quickly began to grow into a sizable piece of work. In order to be intelligible, he found that he had to provide his two essays with a historical narrative, a geographical context, an examination of the organisational structure of Roman regiments, and more information about Roman Scotland (particularly a description of the camps that had been discovered), and an account of the Antonine Wall. These topics gradually coalesced and evolved into The Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain, the manuscript and illustrations for which occupied him until 1773. That work still lay ahead. For the moment the discovery of the camp at Cleghorn was strong evidence that, by fieldwork and observation, the movements of the Roman army might yet be reconstructed. What is more, this new camp prompted two immediate questions: were there others to be found in these western valleys, and could he prove that the Romans followed this route from Carlisle into Scotland,



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rather than advancing through the eastern Borders as the discovery of the camp at Channelkirk in upper Lauderdale might imply? To answer this, William made use of his growing network of contacts, and the person that he approached was someone he had probably met through Robert  Melville. Lieutenant Colonel Roy, as he now was, had the status, and the confidence, to enlist the help of George ClerkMaxwell, the second surviving son of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, who had been appointed as a Commissioner of the Customs in Scotland in 1763 and who had inherited from his father the estate of Dumcrieff, outside Moffat. George was described as a skilful amateur engineer and draughtsman who designed roads and bridges on his estates; he had also been appointed by the Board of Customs in 1764 to make (or to oversee) a survey of the coast of the south-west of Scotland in an effort to reduce the success of smugglers, especially those from the Isle of Man. Further, he was an energetic agricultural improver who had a well-developed eye for country.69 Despite the difference in their backgrounds, the two men probably got on very well. Steeped in Roman antiquity from his childhood, but suitably briefed, no doubt, by William, George was asked to search Annandale, a valley he knew intimately. William’s advice will have included the suggestion that if more camps were to be discovered they might be spaced at about a day’s march apart, subject to there being suitable topographical opportunities to accommodate sites that might be up to about 50 hectares (125  acres) in size, as at Battledykes in Strathmore. Although this estimate of m ­ arching distance was a crude yardstick, it would have narrowed the areas of search, and it proved its worth. Quite when George did his fieldwork was not recorded. Working out from Carlisle and up Annandale, he missed the camps that have since been revealed as cropmarks on aerial photography at Kirkpatrick Fleming, a day’s march out (the Military Survey suggests that they may have already been levelled by the plough), but at the next interval he did light upon the earthworks of a camp of about 15 hectares at Torwood, immediately to the west of Lockerbie. Twenty kilometres further on – another day’s march – and close to his own home, he found the poorly preserved ‘vestiges of an intrenchment’ next to the Roman fortlet at Milton. William was not sure that this intrenchment was a camp and it has turned out to be part of the perimeter of an annexe of a levelled fort; this was only discovered by aerial photography, along with the camp that he had predicted.70 Although he had tried, William regretted that had not found any camps at the next set of locations that he anticipated (Elvanfoot, Crawford, Coulter and Biggar), although twentieth-century

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fieldwork and aerial photography have revealed them.71 Nevertheless, he was satisfied that his model of the western route into Caledonia had been vindicated. Nearly a decade earlier, before the Seven Years War, William had closely inspected the remains of several camps and, especially in Strathmore, he had learned enough about them to suggest where more might be discovered. The ones that he had seen were each characterised by the bank and ditch of their perimeter, surviving in rough grass and moorland pasture, but they were little more than that: empty perimeters. In contrast, in the years since 1755, active service in southern England and in Germany had given William direct experience of many camps of his own army, both on campaign and in winter quarters: these were places of ordered bustle, full of men, equipment and horses. No space was wasted: all of it had a purpose in this organised world. He knew how it all worked in the Georgian army, but how did the Romans plan and organise their temporary camps, the lightly defended ‘marching camps’ or summer camps (castra aestiva) that protected the troops overnight on campaign? Could he reconstruct the allocation of space within those empty earthwork perimeters that he had surveyed? He realised that if he could understand the design and internal arrangements of the camps – the Roman system of castrametation – he would be able to estimate how many men each camp contained; armed with that, he could calculate the strength of Agricola’s army, or that of any subsequent Roman campaign. Using once again his Classical education and Robert Melville’s study of the Legion, he turned to the descriptions provided by Polybius, a Greek historian of the second century bc, whose account of the army of Republican Rome which was then considered the most authoritative.72 Drawing extensively on this, in the second section of The Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain, written in the late 1760s and early 1770s, William went into considerable technical detail on the internal planning of a typical Roman camp. He analysed the disposition of the various elements and ranks in the army and the space that would be allocated to them, taking into account the character of the unit – that is, whether it was one of the elite Legions or an auxiliary regiment raised in the provinces, and whether it was composed of infantry or cavalry or both. Using the layout that Polybius described, and making allowances for the streets between the rows of leather tents and for the width of the road just inside the defences, William then worked out the area that would be required for 1,000 men, arriving at a figure of 148,900 sq ft (13,832 sq m). He then adduced from Livy and from a late fourth-century military manual,



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De  Re Militari, by the Christian writer, Vegetius, the number and names of the gates and the internal streets, and the direction in which each camp faced. Only later did he track down the fragmentary text on the same subject written by ‘Hyginus’ and known as De Munitionibus Castrorum. He then painstakingly did all of his calculations again, but he found the Hyginian system less satisfactory for his Scottish material than that of Polybius. In all of this, William was thinking operationally, focusing especially on how the troops could leave the camp quickly, if it was attacked, so as to form up with the greatest rapidity.73 William was the first to make calculations of this kind and, typically, he refined all of his figures to an accuracy of a single foot or less. He was not, however, the only army officer to be concerned with these things. In 1757 Lieutenant John Clarke, of the Marines (later a Lieutenant Colonel and Governor of Senegambia), had published his translation of Vegetius74 and the appearance of this book may have been an additional stimulus for William to embark on his mathematical estimates. Since then, archaeologists have sporadically returned to the problem of density and capacity in castrametation, a revival of interest being given a particular impetus by the discovery of many more camps through aerial photography over Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century. Modern analysis has suggested that William’s figures, which suggested that the average density of occupation within a Roman camp was about 475 men per hectare, were eminently plausible, but that may be no surprise from someone who, as a quartermaster, was himself actively engaged in the planning and operation of military camps.75 Once the idea of writing The Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain had established itself in his mind, William was compelled to re-examine the evidence on the ground, and in 1769 he found the opportunity to undertake some of the necessary fieldwork. On his travels to and from the North he sketched the camps that George Clerk-Maxwell had discovered in Annandale, and the large examples that he himself had found, at Rey Cross and Crackenthorpe, as he crossed the northern Pennines on the Roman road over the Stainmore Pass. These two very similar sites, with their multiple gates and oval traverses, he compared to the (much smaller) southern camp at Burnswark.76 That same year, when William probably walked the line of the Antonine Wall, preparing its description, the construction of the Forth and Clyde Canal was in full swing; good building stone was therefore in great demand and the forts of the wall provided convenient quarries. During this sporadic stonerobbing, the remains of a fine bathhouse were uncovered inside the fort at Castlecary, on the line of the wall between Cumbernauld and Falkirk.

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William seized the opportunity to rescue some information77 by drawing the long suite of rooms – including two with apses, and a heavily buttressed circular steam-room – that had been revealed. He summed it up as ‘a very elegant plan of a house, in the style of Palladio’. He was told that bones (possibly much later burials) had been discovered within some of the rooms and that large quantities of charred wheat had been found elsewhere; this unaccustomed close contact with excavated material produced from him an uncharacteristically colourful interpretation: that ‘the fort had been taken by storm, or perhaps surprised in the night by the Britons, who had put the garrison indiscriminately to the sword’ and that the fort had then been set on fire. Farther to the east, William followed the line of Dere Street, the great Roman road from York to the shores of the Firth of Forth, and he sketched the large but fragmentary camp at Channelkirk in upper Lauderdale that Sir John Clerk of Penicuik and Robert Melville had independently discovered. A day’s march to the south, where the road crossed the Tweed, he had a sudden revelation: towering above the right bank of the river, and especially distinctive when travelling north, are the three conical summits of the Eildon Hills. This, he realised, must be the Trimontium (‘the three mountains’) that had been included in the Geography drawn up by Claudius Ptolemaus (usually known as Ptolemy) in the mid-second century. Ptolemy’s text consisted of a list of placenames with their coordinates from which a map (after a sort) can be constructed. This is distorted for it has northern Britain bent at right angles to the east, and the name Trimontium falls into southwest Scotland. No clear candidate for this topographical placename had been suggested in that area, something that posed a problem to eighteenth-century antiquaries in their efforts to understand the geography of Roman Britain. William’s revelatory equation of Trimontium with the Eildons78 (something that seems blindingly obvious to modern travellers) had the potential to unlock the conundrum and it got his mind working on a new task by which the advance of Agricola and the newly discovered camps could be set into a firm geographical background. His working life in the south meant that it was two years later that he prepared his plan of the environs of Trimontium and also a rare landscape drawing,79 a view of the hills as they will have appeared to the Romans as they approached them from the south-east along the route that would become Dere Street. In that summer of 1771 he also travelled farther north, following a hunch that must have been forming since 1755, to trace where Agricola’s army would have crossed the Tay. To his immense satisfaction he found, on the eastern bank, within a curve



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of the river near Scone, the fragmentary remains of a very large camp on a farm called, fittingly enough, Grassy Walls.80 Everything seemed to be falling neatly into place. THE FORGER AND HIS TRAP

With hindsight, perhaps William should have stayed in the field and confined his conclusions about the distant past to the important evidence that he had gathered by observation. He could not know that twentyfive years before, in Denmark, a trap had been set for him and for others like him: a trap that he was constitutionally blind to, and into the jaws of which he, and the rest of the antiquarian establishment, would unwittingly fall. In 1747 William Stukeley, the first Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, had received a letter, drafted the year before, from a certain Charles Julius Bertram81 who was employed to give English lessons in the Royal Marine Academy in Copenhagen. Then aged twenty-three, Bertram presented himself to Stukeley as a Professor of English in the Academy and even prefaced his letter with a spurious quotation from Horace. A correspondence ensued. Bertram subsequently enclosed as his bona fides a recommendation from Hans Gram, the historian and Keeper of the Royal Library, and baited the trap for Stukeley by asking his advice on what he claimed was a copy of an incomplete medieval manuscript by Richard, a monk of Westminster, to which he had gained access. The subject of the fictitious text – which Bertram gradually fed to Stukeley, piece by piece, over a number of years – was a hitherto unknown account of Roman Britain, together with an extensive itinerary (lists of placenames along the main Roman roads) and a copy of an associated map. It was in fact a rehash of well-known sources with a strong admixture of invention, but it carried conviction because it provided plausible additional information on familiar subjects. Initially Stukeley was cautious as there was no clarity about the provenance of the manuscript, but in his search for a context he discovered that there was indeed a fourteenth-century monk at Westminster, called Richard of Cirencester, who was, moreover, the author of a genuine historical work. By this stroke of luck, which he probably did not anticipate, Bertram wormed his way so far into Stukeley’s confidence that in 1756 he even inveigled his poor dupe into having him elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. The text that he proffered in his cruel but clever hoax, usually known as ‘De Situ Britanniae’, was irresistible as it purported to draw on unknown ancient documentary sources to fill in many of the gaps in contemporary knowledge, gaps that Bertram will

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have been able to identify relatively easily within the pages of Horsley’s Britannia Romana. The extent of his invention can be gauged from the fact that of the 250 placenames that he listed, 100 were ‘new’ or had additional information provided. In 1757 Stukeley published a commentary82 on this spectacular breakthrough and Bertram produced a ‘corrected’ edition soon afterwards, deviously bookending ‘Richard’s’ work with the genuine texts of Gildas and Nennius. In his commentary, Stukeley had put his caution behind him, and his endorsement of Bertram’s discovery carried enormous weight. Unwittingly, he also oiled the springs of the trap specifically for William. ‘De Situ Britanniae’ provided markedly more detail on the placenames of Roman Scotland than had hitherto been available. Stukeley baulked83 at providing identifications of the places listed in Ireland, ‘Nor shall I pretend to assign places in Scotland, any farther than [Bertram’s] map directs me, but leave them too to those that have proper opportunities of inquiry in that kingdom.’ William, more than anyone else, had had those opportunities – most graphically in his identification of Trimontium – and so he set himself the task of unravelling the complex geography of Roman Britain, using the fresh insights provided by ‘Richard’. In William’s intellectual life this was a tragedy. The honest, diligent individual tends to start from the premise that everyone is honest and diligent, and thus becomes vulnerable to the hoaxer. Bertram’s deception, probably a jape that simply got out of hand, had been endorsed by Dr Stukeley and the Society of Antiquaries, no less, so there need be no hesitation, within the normal parameters, about accepting the bulk of this new set of data. It was an enticing and pleasurable challenge for there were equations to be made between the names and the sites on the ground that William had visited and studied. Because of this it also called to his sense of duty: he was in a position to address the questions that Stukeley had posed, and so it was incumbent upon him to do so. If he could match the names with the places, he would be able to thresh out the truth and so advance knowledge. He sketched out this newly revealed geography in The Military Antiquities (after his usual prefatory apology for the shortcomings of his work), focusing particularly on the fresh insights provided for Scotland. He quoted extensively from ‘Richard’s’ account of the northern provinces of ‘Albion, Valentia, Vespasiana and Caledonia’, and described, from his own excellent fieldwork, the Roman roads in Scotland which might then be related to Richard’s itineraries. Having gathered all of his information, William then tried to knit these strands together with all the other literary and archaeological evidence at his disposal, province



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by province. But for its fatal reliance on Bertram, it could have been a fine piece of work. Had he ever tumbled to the forgery he would have been angry and mortified at this gratuitous betrayal, so inimical to the values and aspirations of the Enlightenment, and it is perhaps just as well that he never knew how much his acceptance of Bertram’s manuscript damaged the reputation of his other essays in The Military Antiquities. As it turned out, only about a quarter of his text is rendered effectively valueless by its reliance on the evidence from ‘Richard’, principally the first three chapters of Book 4 in which William tried to set out that new geography. The great majority of the first three Books, which deal with the history of the province, the organisation of the army and its castrametation, with the Roman roads, and the camps of North Britain, are barely affected. The same is true of the final chapter in Book 4, the account of the Antonine Wall. All in all, most of William’s text, and his reputation in this respect, is due for some rehabilitation. William was by no means alone in being deceived. Although doubts began to be expressed later in the eighteenth century,84 all of the most prominent antiquaries and historians – even Edward Gibbon – made reference to Richard. It was not until the 1860s that detailed textual analysis was brought to bear and Bertram’s ingenious fabrication was finally debunked. By then, however, a great deal of damage had been done: the penetration and persistence of Bertram’s toxin within the system – which the authority of William’s name within cartographic circles would certainly have furthered – is astonishing.85 Before they were disproved, many of the placenames that Bertram invented were included in popular publications and, in consequence, some were used as labels on nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps; it was only at the introduction of the metric series, after 1969, that Bertram’s fabrications were finally expunged. Even so, a few of these fictitious names, such as ‘Ad Fines’ which William identified with Chew Green on the English Border, are still regularly used on the internet. THE ‘DETACHED PIECES’

At the end of The Military Antiquities, William provided, as appendices, five ‘Detached Pieces’ which could not be readily incorporated within the main text. Two of these, on the castrametation of Hyginus and on the discovery of the bathhouse at Netherby, have already been mentioned, but the first appendix86 is concerned with a carefully planned expedition that he made in the summer of 1772 to northern Herefordshire, hoping

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perhaps to emulate Robert Melville’s success in Strathmore in 1754. William was searching for the location of another battle described by Tacitus: the attack made by the Governor of Britain, Ostorius Scapula, on Caratacus, the leader of resistance to the Roman occupation, in ad 51. This had taken place in the tribal territory of the Ordovices, so William set out to match the topography of the middle Welsh Marches to the historical account. He focused on the valley of the River Teme, between Knighton and Leintwardine, and he made a sketch survey of the area. In particular, he considered the merits of the hillfort on Coxall Knoll, a complex site of several structural phases, as the stronghold from which the Britons had been routed. He spent enough time in the valley to survey this fort and two others, Caer Caradoc (above Chapel Lawn) and Brandon Camp, but, in the end, he was not convinced and thought that the battle should probably be sought farther north, in the upper Severn. It is highly probable that he was hoping to find, close to one of the hillforts, traces of Roman camps, just as Melville had done; but, if so, he was disappointed. Nevertheless, although he did not know it, his highly tuned instincts had served him well: two centuries later, aerial photography has detected the cropmarks of three camps within the area of his sketch-map, at Walford, Buckton and Brampton Bryan.87 Wherever the battle was actually fought, he would have been gratified to know that the camp at Brampton Bryan, just across the river from Coxall Knoll, is the largest known in England: at 23 hectares it was much smaller than those in Strathmore, but it would still have accommodated, on his own equation, a formidable force of about 11,000 men. Back in Scotland, three years earlier, William had had the opportunity to inspect very different Roman remains: five altars, a broken statue and other artefacts that had been found in 1771 in a pit just outside the fort of Auchendavy on the Antonine Wall. These, which formed the subject of another of the ‘detached pieces’, he drew to an exemplary standard, recording their inscriptions, the details of their carving and the damage that they had sustained. Alongside these he had added two other drawings: one was of the altar, dedicated by the Second and Sixth Legions to the goddess of Fortune, that had been found in 1769 within the bathhouse at Castlecary, and the other was a decorated inscription found in 1764, probably recording the erection of a building inside the fort by the First Cohort of Tungrians. Whilst respecting the importance of these original stone documents, William knew that he was not a specialist in such matters; he drew them through his compulsion to record everything worth recording and probably because these ­ inscriptions were the only ones that had not then been published. He asked for



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advice, and a careful commentary on the inscriptions88 was provided by John Anderson, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, who became known (from his scientific work) as ‘Jolly Jack Phosphorus’.89 The last of the ‘detached pieces’ was also peripheral to the themes of his essays, but he evidently felt that it needed to be set down. It consists of his surveys of the spectacular twin prehistoric hillforts known as the Brown and White Caterthuns,90 on the northern edge of Strathmore, which he had most probably examined in 1755 during his project to record Melville’s camps there. He almost certainly included these two surveys within his draft of The Military Antiquities out of a desire to place on record all of the work that he had done, but his stated reason was ‘in order that the difference in style between these and the Roman works may more fully appear’. If so, he chose well as these are complex oval sites, each with multiple defensive circuits and various methods of construction, exhibiting several structural phases; they are utterly unlike anything produced by the Roman military. For these two hillforts, William had produced large-scale surveys that may have been done quite quickly; although they are competent, they are somewhat simplified. They do, however, pose something of a wider puzzle. He clearly recognised that these defensive sites were the products of the indigenous people (as he did for the hillforts of northern Herefordshire) and that they could not fitted within the schemes of Roman ­castrametation that he had studied so closely, and yet elsewhere he had labelled a small handful of other sites as putatively Roman without (to modern eyes) any justification. These include Woody Castle, Liddel Strength, Castle O’er and Tibbers Castle, all in Dumfriesshire, and Grinnan Hill, near Ardoch.91 These are all relatively early surveys by William and their inclusion in The Military Antiquities seems to have relied on their classification as Roman by earlier writers or on his inexperienced first reaction to them as earthworks. In fact, in the captions for Castle O’er and Tibbers Castle he had already downgraded them to ‘supposed to have been a Roman post’, and the latter was probably only mistakenly included by the editorial committee when the Society of Antiquaries was preparing the book for publication.92 A LEGACY BEQUEATHED

By the midsummer of 1773 a copy93 of William’s manuscript and illustrations of The Military Antiquities had been made and the volume was ready for the press. It was not, however, to be printed for another

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twenty years. There is no record as to whether William attempted to get it published at the time, but the likelihood is that he did not. There would have been two principal reasons for this. The first was one of cost: he had produced a manuscript of about 120,000 words and about fifty very large illustrations (maps, diagrams and site-plans), several of which were of a size that would have to be tipped into a printed volume. He will have known that the cost of production of such a volume would be very substantial: for the engraving of the plates, for good quality paper and for printing. It is not known quite how much was finally paid in the 1790s by the Society of Antiquaries for its print run of about 700 copies of the book, but it was certainly in excess of £900, and probably very much more.94 Although William was comfortably off, this would have been a very substantial investment for him as an individual, with no certainty of an adequate return. The second, and more important reason that the book remained in manuscript was that William had moved on: his mind was busy in quite another direction. This is apparent in the preface of The Military Antiquities where, across nearly two pages, he goes to inordinate lengths to explain the mathematical and geodetic basis for the scales on his maps, providing far more detail than any user of those maps would ever require, including an exposition of the value of a mean degree of latitude and the lengths of a degree of longitude as it varied between 49 degrees and 60 degrees North. Similarly, while others might have been content with using a simple North-point, his map of the Antonine Wall bears the line of longitude four degrees West from Greenwich, the magnetic variation in 1755, and the line of latitude for 56 degrees North. Although his project had given him great pleasure and he was keen to complete it in a tidy manner, he was now more interested in the shape of the Earth and in establishing a national scheme of cartography than in charting the remains of antiquity. Combining these preoccupations, one of his final tasks had been to produce a map of Roman Scotland to illustrate his text. This map had a suitable title for the Enlightenment: Mappa Britanniae Septentrionalis Faciei Romanae Secundum Fidem Monumentorum [A Map of North Britain in the Roman period, compiled in accordance with the evidence of the monuments]. It was a reduction of the Military Survey of Scotland and was described as being ‘compiled from the latest actual surveys and observations, whereof a considerable part were made by the author himself. It is intended as a sort of skeleton of the country, where only the great and striking features are represented.’ It was presented at a scale which, characteristically, William presented in four different units, with the numerical variations in their values explained.



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The only major addition to the map itself was that of the islands of the west coast which had not been included in the Military Survey and were ‘inserted from the common map’. The physical topography of the country forms a strong background on which he placed symbols and labels for the Roman roads and the Roman military sites, although, inevitably, the value of the whole was marred by the use of the placenames ‘recorded’ by Richard of Cirencester. The plate was engraved in 1774 and a small number seemed to have been printed off at the time for William to give as presents; it eventually appeared as the first illustration in The Military Antiquities.95 William had expended a huge effort in the fieldwork and research for this project and in getting his draft to a reasonably satisfactory state,96 and so even though there was little prospect of it being published, he now had to ensure its safety. The solution was to present the better copy – the one that he himself had written and which contained his own illustrations – to the King, in whose library it would be comparatively secure. It was likely to be appreciated there as George III was intensely interested in topography and was gradually assembling a huge collection of maps, prints and paintings related to it.97 Even after this safe deposit of the manuscript, William could not quite bring himself to leave the subject entirely for there were ends to be tied up. In the summer of 1774, before the American war got underway, William spent a great deal of time in Scotland, not least in connection with the scientific observations on Schiehallion in Perthshire (Chapter 5). That September he took this last opportunity to make a much more accurate plan of the complex Roman earthworks at Chew Green, compensating at last for the less than adequate depiction produced by his colleagues for the Military Survey in 1752. On his way up to the Border line, he discovered the remains of the camps at Towford (now known as Pennymuir I and II), a pleasing bonus, which he planned at the same time.98 He found it difficult to let go, and the kindred enthusiasm of his friends did not allow him to detach himself entirely from Roman camps; William continued to receive enquiries and pieces of information as a result.99 Proposed by Joseph Banks, William was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1776; he does not seem to have been a particularly active member despite the fact that from 1780 the Society’s accommodation was in Somerset House,100 shared (in an uneasy relationship) with the Royal Society, of which William was an habitué. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that he never joined the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland which was founded in 1780. A number of London-based Scots did sign up, including his friend Sir John Pringle (the President of the

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Royal Society 1772–8), but he resigned after only six months in 1782101 and it is possible that this decision influenced William also. Although he continued to read some ancient history, including Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (published in 1776–88)102 William’s attention had shifted ­elsewhere – to science and geodesy. There has been little recent discussion of William’s place in the history of British archaeology, but he can now be seen as a pioneer well ahead of his time. In his usual way, William made no great claims about his work on the archaeology of Roman Scotland. In the preface103 to The Military Antiquities he wrote: Improvements of every kind advance by slow degrees; and it is not until the first hints have been communicated to, and examined by many, that they are gradually brought nearer to perfection. Though in these Essays some new lights will be thrown on the temporary castrametation of the Romans, and the ancient geography of North Britain, yet there may still be found room for improvement. Some points the author may have mistaken entirely; and, in endeavouring to establish others, he may have lent too much to the probability of his own conjectures. If, therefore, from future discoveries of Roman works, or the better judgement of those who may choose to amuse themselves in researches of this kind, there should be found reason to depart wholly from, or to alter in any essential degree, his conclusions, the author’s views will be sufficiently answered in having induced others to undertake the subject and contribute towards its perfection.

O. G. S. Crawford, the first Archaeology Officer of the Ordnance Survey, had a different view of the permanent value of William’s work. Whilst he gave full credit to Melville for his brilliant initial detective work in discovering the camps in Strathmore, which had been born of the empathy of a soldier with his predecessors, and which was so effectively developed and expanded by William, Crawford concluded that ‘[Melville] and his friend and contemporary Roy come into the stuffy room of eighteenth-century antiquarianism like a breath of clean, fresh air. They tower over their contemporaries and many of their successors as did Bede over the other monkish chroniclers and hagiographers.’104 The difference that the two men made is abundantly apparent when William’s plans and maps are set side by side with what had come before. A direct comparison can be made at Dalginross, near Comrie, where the Roman fort and the camp were illustrated by Alexander Gordon, by John Horsley (Figures 4.3–4), and by William (Figure 4.11). Gordon was conscientious in his way, spending a full day on the site and producing a crisply deft engraving, but he had relied on linear measurements alone. He paced out the earthworks and got the overall



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Figure 4.11  William’s survey of the Roman fort (‘Victoria’) and camp at Dalginross. The extent of cultivation and erosion by the former river-cliff are clearly shown. Insets illustrate the camp’s complex gate defences, and the forts and camp at Cawthorn, Yorkshire, where analogous gates survive. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 248, pl. xi

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proportions about right, but the relationship between the two sites is incorrect – he twisted their positions to make their adjacent sides neatly parallel to one another – and he ‘corrected’ the positions of the north and south gates of the camp, placing them centrally within each side instead of showing them markedly offset to the west. Symmetry was also falsely contrived at the gates where their distinctive design was rounded into pierced external bastions.105 All in all, it is an idealised depiction of limited value. John Horsley was also found wanting: the plan that he provided in Britannia Romana is severely compromised and barely intelligible. He had not been on the site and his version seems to have been drawn up from a misunderstanding of notes made by a third party. Again, the relative positions of the fort and the camp are distorted, and this was compounded when a classic mistake was made on the north side: in transferring the measurements from the notes to the plan, the wrong points were joined up, making a nonsense of the whole thing. This was compounded when he tried to make the north and south gates central in their sides, thus offsetting them in the opposite direction from reality. He did, however, achieve a better representation of the defences of the gates themselves.106 In contrast, William surveyed what he saw to a professional standard, and he allowed the surviving earthworks to tell their own story. The overall proportions, and the form of the gates, are correct and he even provided an expanded detail of a gate at a larger scale so that their distinctive form could be appreciated. Crucially, however, he showed the condition of the earthworks and their contemporary context, and this included the recording of those stretches of the perimeter that had already been levelled by cultivation, some time before agricultural improvement completed the process.107 Although William provided brief descriptions of the camps that he had surveyed108 he thought that the plans were usually the best record; in consequence, details such as the heights of ramparts and the depths of ditches, as surviving, were not given for he was not so much interested in conservation as in the holding capacity of each camp. Nevertheless, his careful depiction of what remained, and what had been destroyed, is important because it allows a proper assessment of the evidence to be made, and some further analysis: for instance, at Dalginross the pattern of survival and destruction that William recorded suggests that the westerly pair of gates on the north and south sides of the camp were probably mirrored by an easterly pair, thus providing more information about the internal organisation of the camp and its capacity. Dalginross is not an isolated example as the same comparisons (with the same conclusions) can be made between the maps of the Antonine Wall that



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Gordon, Horsley and William produced. The latter’s is far and away the most accurate and informative, executed in pen and watercolour of high quality. The number of citations that it still receives proves its lasting value.109 William’s fieldwork was not comprehensive – there were certainly other camps in Strathmore and in Clydesdale that may still have survived as earthworks when he was there – but he was more successful in the pursuit of them than his successors; the strike rate that he and Melville achieved ‘was not equalled until the twentieth century when the aeroplane introduced a somewhat unfair form of competition’.110 In his studies of castrametation William provided the theoretical background, illuminating the factors behind the original design of the camps; this could be compared with the evidence on the ground but he did not allow this insight to distort his plans of the evidence in front of him. Raising his sights, he was also interested in the distribution of the camps across the landscape and, having himself been much involved with the practical logistics of military movement, it was inevitable that his attention would be drawn to the Roman roads. Again, his approach to them was empirical, being content with nothing less than tracing each one on horseback – an ideal vantage point for fieldwork – and setting out brief descriptions of their routes.111 The picture that he painted of the road network in Roman Scotland has not significantly changed over the succeeding 250 years. In his Will, written in 1786, William gave some thought to what should be done with the results of his research.112 He left the final decisions to others but, at the same time, he did not want them to make the wrong choices: The Books of Antiquities not being yet arranged so completely as it should be, I had thoughts of leaving [them] to the Society of Antiquaries. My executors will do in this as they judge best. If at any time the Collection should be published, the King’s copy would be the best to engrave the Drawings from.

The Antiquaries would go on to produce the book but the failure to publish soon after the draft was effectively complete in 1773 meant that its influence was delayed by twenty years, and even then it was contributary rather than decisive in developments such as the depiction of antiquities on maps. This had been steadily growing (with variable quality) among the county surveyors but the earliest specific instruction by the Board of Ordnance on the consistent depiction of antiquities did not appear until 1816. A little earlier, in southern Wiltshire, the surveyors Phillip and Edmund Crocker had drawn on the knowledge of

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Sir Richard Colt Hoare who had been one of the original recipients of The Military Antiquities. With input from William Cunnington, Hoare was preparing his hugely influential Ancient History of Wiltshire, the first volume of which appeared in 1812 under a motto which William would have endorsed: ‘We speak from Facts not Theory’. The collaboration between Colt Hoare and the surveyors resulted in the extensive depiction of antiquities on the Ordnance map, at a density which was not surpassed for more than a century.113 It was not just a matter of depicting those antiquities that were prominent in the landscape. William’s decisions on the inclusion of antiquities on the Military Survey and in his site-plans in The Military Antiquities had, on occasion, been even wider, encompassing things that could no longer be seen: the sites of battles (for instance, Falkirk), the discovery of ‘urns’ in a burial mound (Walford near Leintwardine), or even where The Hazard sloop had run aground in the Kyle of Tongue. It seems to have been accepted very early on that although archaeological earthworks were not often ‘hard detail’, their depiction on the Ordnance map should be to a standard of accuracy that was equal to that of contemporary features. The publication of the first editions of the 6-inch and 25-inch maps, from the 1840s to the 1880s, included the depiction of earthworks at standard scales and in uniform style, so that by the end of the nineteenth century, when the pressure for the protection of archaeological sites was strong, the Ordnance Survey had unintentionally produced ‘a visual awareness of the form of earthworks which meant that inventories [of such sites] as lists alone were not acceptable’114 if that pressure was to be effective. These currents led, in due course, to the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882 and to the establishment of the Royal Commissions on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Scotland, Wales and England in 1908.115 This visual awareness had also stimulated more intensive recording by a number of energetic individuals,116 and the emphasis on the large-scale planning of earthworks that soon emerged in the Royal Commissions was to accelerate the practice of archaeological field survey – d ­ iagnosing from the surface remains without recourse to excavation – in a way that William would have recognised. He had used observation, measurement and depiction to understand landscape features, and he had drawn upon his experience to interpret the earthworks that he saw. This was essentially a subjective exercise in which he had differentiated the natural slopes from the man-made ones, a distinction that is already clear in his large-scale work at Castledykes in 1753. Further, in showing those elements that had subsequently been destroyed, and in

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­ ddressing o a ­ verlapping features, he had begun to indicate the passage of time within the plan (just as he had, in a very different way, in the plan of the Battle of Minden). He had struggled with unravelling the chronological relationships between overlapping earthworks when he had first encountered them at Ardoch, but the approach at Chew Green, two decades later, is altogether more confident without losing its sensitivity. By the time that Walter Scott came to write his third Waverley novel, The Antiquary (published in 1816), The Military Antiquities had been out for more than twenty years, and William’s name had become a byword for archaeological authenticity. In the most memorable scene in Scott’s book,117 the antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck, by way of recommending his ‘Essay on Castrametation’, was passionately advocating that his own site, on the Kaim of Kinprunes, was a Roman camp and the site of the final battle between Agricola and the Caledonians. He was exasperated that these precious earthworks had been overlooked by his most eminent predecessors, whose names he nevertheless managed to mangle: Indistinct! – why, the great station at Ardoch, or that at Burnswark in Annandale, may be clearer, doubtless, because they are stative forts, whereas this was only an occasional encampment. Indistinct! – why, you must suppose that fools, boors, and idiots, have ploughed up the land, and, like beasts and ignorant savages, have thereby obliterated two sides of the square, and greatly injured the third; but you see, yourself, the fourth side is quite entire! … It is astonishing how blind we professed antiquaries sometimes are! Sir Robert Sibbald, Saunders Gordon, General Roy, Doctor Stokely, – why, it escaped all of them.

Tongue-in-cheek it may have been, but this was another instance of William’s name being kept in the public mind: the Military Survey, credited to him, had recently been used by Arrowsmith as a principal source for a commercial map, and now William was being popularly cited as one of the great contributors to the understanding of Scotland’s past. That was true; his place in the history of British archaeology was already assured. NOTES 1. Horsley 1732, ii–iii.; cf. Daiches 1986, 9. 2. Roy 1793, iv: ‘The study of Antiquity was but little the object of the young people employed in that service, yet it was not wholly neglected; many sketches of Roman works having been made in the ordinary course of the other observations.’

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3. HC4, 104–11 (H. H. Minor). 4. The London Gazette, 12 April 1746. 5. Canmore: the online database of Historic Environment Scotland. 6. Roy 1793, pl. 33; William thought the place sufficiently important as to  include a map showing it in the context of the wider Moray Firth (pl. 34). 7. The other possible antiquities noted on the mapping of the coast are few and far between. The ‘Danish Entrenchment’ marked at Aberdour, near Fraserburgh, may have been the prehistoric promontory fort on the landward side of the medieval castle at Dundarg; a later square annotation on the map to the west may mark another, unrecorded, site. William may have noted An Dun at Clashnessie, on the south side of Eddrachillis Bay in Sutherland (which he recalled with such fondness), where a structure seems to be depicted. 8. Noted by Gordon 1726, 16. 9. William seems to have missed the evanescent earthworks of the hillfort: Jobey 1978; RCAHMS 1997, 129–30, 180. 10. The first page of this letter in the Royal Archives (Cumberland Papers/ MAIN/44 ff 268–268a) was reproduced by O’Donoghue (1977, 15–17). Missing in 2020 but copied in BL MFR/676 Reel 69, Box 44, letters 266–90 (1750–2), images 268–268a. 11. Roy 1793, 197–9, pl. 46. 12. Roy 1793, pl. 32. Twelve miles further north-east, he also marked two standing stones – ‘Grey Lads’ – destroyed by the mid-nineteenth century: see ‘Goose Rig’, RCAHMS 1956, 95, no. 115. 13. Roy 1793, pl. 25: ‘General map of the lower part of Annandale …’ 14. Montgomery 2020. 15. Ogilvie and Richmond 1967; Hanson 1987; Maxwell 1990. In his library, William had two editions of Tacitus: one published by Elzevier in Amsterdam in 1649 and Thomas Gordon’s translation of 1753: Christie 1790, lots 20 and 19. 16. DNB (I. G. Brown 2004); Macdonald 1933, 32–40; Keppie 2013, 16–18. Montgomery 2020, 39–43, 59–63. 17. William later had a copy in his library: Christie 1790, lot 148. 18. Gordon 1726, 15–19. Paul Sandby had been working at Drumlanrig only eighteen months beforehand and it is not unlikely that this also highlighted Tibbers Castle for William. 19. The distance that Gordon cited, ’about fourteen miles to the north of Burnswark’, would fit better with the Roman fort at Raeburnfoot, and it is possible that he had received the first report of the site there, which was not otherwise noted until the nineteenth century: Mercer 2018, 18–19, 21. For Castle O’er, see Mercer 2018, especially 41–50, 55–83, and RCAHMS 1997, 78–80, 82. 20. Gordon 1726, 16–19, 38–42, pls 1–2, 5–7.



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21. Macdonald 1933, 19–20. 22. Horsley 1732, 118–19, 146, 154, and the maps between 158 and 159. For George Mark, see Keppie 2013, 11, 27. For Watchclose and Brown Dikes, see Welfare and Swan 1995, 51, 79–80. 23. Horsley 1732, 42–5, pl. opp. p. 44. Macdonald (1933, 21) thought that the errors in the plan of Dalginross were the fault of the engraver, but this is clearly not the case. 24. Roy 1793, v. 25. Horsley 1732, 367. RCAHMS 1978, 124–8. 26. Roy 1793, pl. 27. 27. For Aubrey at Avebury, see Welfare 1989. Crawford 1953, 36. For a ­ relevant definition of field archaeology, see Bowden and McOmish 2012, 21. 28. Melville’s fieldwork in Strathmore is described in Camden 1789, 414*–417*. For Sir John Clerk, see DNB (Rosalind Mitchison 2015) and Brown 2020. 29. In May 1757, when the Engineers were accorded military rank, Matthew became an Ensign, along with William; in July 1758 he died of wounds sustained in the disastrous attack on Fort Ticonderoga: Porter 1889, 181, 186; Gentleman’s Magazine 28, 390, 498. 30. They also visited the Roman fort of Strageath and ‘entrenchments’ near Arbroath: Macdonald 1939, 248. 31. For Sibbald, see Montgomery 2020, 15–30; HC4, 1304 (C. J. Withers). 32. Camden 1789, 416*. 33. Jones 2011, 2012, 2017. Welfare and Swan 1995. 34. Gordon 1726, 154; Camden 1789, 416*; Crawford 1949, 97–100; Jones 2011, 248–9. 35. Crawford 1949, 100–2; Jones 2011, 243. 36. Crawford 1949, 93–7; Jones 2011, 141–2. 37. Crawford 1949, 84–6; Jones 2011, 254–5. 38. Camden 1789, 417*; Stuart 1869, 30. For Melville’s sketches, see Macdonald 1939. 39. Roy 1793, vi, 61, pl. 6; Jones 2011, 171–2. Lawrence Keppie has indicated that Sir John Clerk had identified Channelkirk in 1724. 40. DNB (R. T. Cornish 2011); Sheppard 1963, 116–37; Macdonald 1939, 248. Melville 1773. 41. Roy 1793, i–v; cf. T. S. Eliot in ‘Little Gidding’: ‘Not known, because not looked for’, something of a tenet in archaeology. An initial Empire-wide perspective of camps is provided in Hodgson et al. 2017, 521–76. 42. In April 1755 William filled some time by copying a Plan de la Ville de Quebec: K.Top.119.33. 43. Battledykes: Roy 1793, 66, pl. 13; Crawford 1949, 94–7; Jones 2011, 141–2. Keithock: Roy 1793, 67, pl. 14; Crawford 1949, 100–2; Jones 2011, 243. Kirkbuddo: Roy 1793, 67, pl. 14; Crawford 1949, 97–100;

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Jones 2011, 248–9. Lintrose: Roy 1793, 67–8, pl. 14; Crawford 1949, 84–6; Jones 2011, 254–5. 44. These had been vaguely flagged by Robert Sibbald but their position and character had not been made clear. For Sibbald’s and other accounts, see Christison 1898, 423–7. Aerial photography has revealed three smaller camps within the area ploughed before 1755: Jones 2011, 129–31. 45. In fact, the reverse seems to be true (Jones 2011, 131), so at least his puzzlement was justified. 46. Roy 1793, 62–3. 47. Roy 1793, vi. 48. Roy 1793, vi, 155. 49. Keppie 2011. For John Adair, see DNB (Charles Withers 2004). 50. Keppie 2011, 101–5; 2012a, 71–83. 51. Gordon 1726, 49–50, 188. 52. For George Mark and Horsley’s published maps, see Hodgson 1918, 77–9, Horsley 1732, 121, and plates 1–5 between pp. 175–7. Gordon had used an almost identical number of survey stations – 159 – to survey Hadrian’s Wall. 53. Roy 1793, 155, 162. 54. Roy 1793, pl. 35. 55. Roy 1793, pl. 35. The plan showing the representative earthwork elements, taken to the east of Rough Castle, shows ‘one of the interior castella or turrets called Gilmor seat’. This is one of the turfwork ‘expansions’, the purpose of which is not understood; they may have been ­signalling platforms or, indeed, the sites of turrets. Grime’s Dyke, or Graham’s Dyke, was the local name for the Wall. 56. Roy 1793, i, 154. 57. The label is an anachronism as the Carron Iron Works were not founded until 1759 (Watters 2010, 1–16, 74–5); it confirms that although most of the content of the map is of 1755 it was not finalised until many years later. 58. Macdonald 1934, 490. For Castlehill, see Hanson and Jones 2020. 59. Roy 1793, 163–7. 60. Roy 1793, 152–62. 61. James Douglas, working on the graves revealed during the construction of the Chatham Lines, in Kent in 1779, under the command of Hugh Debbeig who encouraged his archaeological investigations: Jessup 1975. 62. Roy 1793, 156–7. 63. Keppie 2012a, 123–34. 64. Roy 1793, vii. 65. K.Top.12.20. For a more modern comparable plan of Maiden Castle, see RCHME 1970, plan opp. p. 498. 66. ‘Plan shewing the position of the ally’d army … 24 October … 1759’: RCIN 732123.



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67. Roy 1793, 104–5. 68. Jones 2011, 173. Feeding his interest in Roman antiquity, William had subscribed towards the publication of the volume by Robert Adam, the architect, on The Ruins of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia, which appeared in 1764. The list of subscribers included many individuals in William’s world: John Lockhart of Lee, David Watson, David Dundas, General Napier, General Skinner and John Pringle. Pl. 2 in that book shows the influence of Paul Sandby (linked to Adam through the Clerks of Penicuik) in the hill shading and in the treatment of the coastline. 69. Clerk 1788; DNB (T. F. Hendeson and A. Pimlott-Baker 2004). ClerkMaxwell’s other estate was Middlebie, near Kirkpatrick Durham, Kirkcudbright, not Middlebie near Ecclefechan. 70. Roy 1793, viii, 79. RCAHMS 1997, 176; Jones 2011, 279–80. As further evidence of the strength of William’s model, a cluster of five large camps has been identified by aerial photography beside the Elvan Water at Beattock, 700 m to the north-west of Milton: Jones 2011, 143–5. For Kirkpatrick-Fleming, Torwood and Milton, see Jones 2011, 251–2, 311 and 279–80. For William’s sketch-plans of Torwood and Milton (which he called Tassiesholm), see Roy 1793, pls 7 and 8. 71. Roy 1793, 61–2. For the camps at Little Clyde, Crawford, Cold Chapel, Wandel, Lamington and Cornhill, see Jones 2011, 255, 177–8, 174, 315, 253, 175. Intriguingly, in his description of the Roman road into Clydesdale, William mentions on p. 104 a ‘square redoubt’ at Little Clyde (St Joseph 1952); it seems that he did not recognise the camp there and it is possible that he was referring to the signal station at Beattock Summit (Maxwell 1976), about 500 m to the south-east, or (less likely) to the fortlet at Redshaw Burn, 4 km away. 72. Cf. Melville 1773. William had at least three volumes on Polybius in his library: Jean-Charles de Folard, Histoire de Polybe (1729); Charles Guischardt, Memoires Militaires sur les Grecs et les Romains (1758); James Hampton, General History of Polybius (1756–61); he also had Livy’s Roman History from the Building of the City (with the supplement of Johann Friensheim) (1761): Christie 1790, lots 22, 78, 62, 21. 73. Roy 1793, 41–54, pls 4–5; 176–96. For De Munitionibus Castrorum, see Campbell 2018. Hyginus had not been included in Melville’s study (1773). 74. Macdona 2017. 75. Maxwell 2004, 81–8; Davies and Jones 2006, 39–45. 76. Roy 1793, 161, pl. 17; Welfare and Swan 1995, 57–60, 34–6. 77. Roy 1793, 161, 200–1, pl. 39. Keppie 2012a, 91–9. 78. Roy 1793, 115–16; Keppie 2012b. 79. Roy 1793, pl. 21. The plan includes a representation of the ramparts of the hillfort on the summit of Eildon Hill North.

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80. Aerial photography has shown that this is one of a series of 55-hectare camps that stretches from Ardoch to Kair House, on the eastern edge of  the Howe of the Mearns, an area in which William correctly predicted the discovery of another camp: Jones 2011, 102–3, 219–20; Roy 1793, 87. 81. DNB (D. Boyd Haycock 2004). 82. Stukeley 1757. Piggott 1985, 126–38; Sweet 2004, 175–81. 83. Stukeley 1757, 40. 84. Sweet 2004, 178–81. 85. Piggott 1985, 138; 1986, 119–22; Rivet and Smith 1979, 182–4. For the longevity of Bertram’s labels on Ordnance Survey maps, see for instance 6-inch Elginshire 1, c. 1950, for Burghead, Moray, still identified as ‘Ptoroton (Roman Station)’. 86. Roy 1793, 171–5. 87. Welfare and Swan 1995, 61–6. 88. Roy 1793, 200–4; pls 38, 39. 89. Keppie 2012a, 96–8. 90. Roy 1793, 205–6, pls 20, 47, 48; Dunwell and Strachan 2007. Other prehistoric sites examined include seven vitrified forts in the north of Scotland: TNA 38/54 art. 30, referenced in Dawson 1958, 721. 91. Roy 1793, pls 8, 23, 26, 49, 31. 92. Macdonald 1917, 214–15. In his description of the Roman roads, William  – or perhaps the later editorial committee – (Roy 1793, 105) confused Tibbers Castle with the fine Roman fortlet in the ‘remarkable pass’ of the Kirk Burn at Durisdeer. Like Liddel Strength, Tibbers Castle and Woody Castle are probably both Norman earthworks, and William may have been unfamiliar, initially, with this type of site. 93. The text of the copy was prepared by an amanuensis and the plates, most probably, by Thomas Chamberlain or one of the other draughtsmen in the Drawing Room of the Tower of London: Hodson 2011, 129–30. This copy is the one that William retained (when the original went to the King) and which is now held by the Society of Antiquaries. 94. Macdonald 1917, 218–19. 95. It may have been at this time that William made amendments to the Military Survey, substituting fresh detail for some of the archaeological sites, such as Dalginross and Ardoch (Hodson 2007, 14). 96. He was rarely satisfied with his efforts: in his Will (TNA Prob 11/1194) he described the draft as ‘not being yet arranged as completely as it should be’, and he suggested to his executors that they might consider depositing the second copy with the Society of Antiquaries, in the hope that the Society take some appropriate action. As it did. 97. Barber 2004. 98. Roy 1793, pl. 22; the plans of these two sites are both dated 20 September 1774. Macdonald 1917, 200–2. Jones 2011, 293–4.



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99. William’s project was well known among his circle (Robert Melville read the manuscript of The Military Antiquities after his return from the West Indies in 1771). One letter, from his friend James Lind in November 1775, came with the plans of several sites, and the promise of a survey of the ‘entrenchment’ at Lornty, near Blairgowrie in Perthshire – actually the perimeter of a medieval deer park – which William had already rejected as a camp. Stuart 1869, 31; Close 1969, 9. For Lornty, now known as Buzzart Dykes: Crawford 1949, 76–8, and RCAHMS 1990, 93–4. 100. Evans 1956, 170–7; Evans 2009, 340–5. William had been the guest of Joseph Banks at the Antiquaries’ meeting in January 1776; he was elected the following month, along with Constantine Phipps. Banks was the main proposer, supported by John Lloyd, Richard Henry and Alexander Bennett. 101. National Museum of Scotland archives: MS Statutes of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland [with lists of members 1780–1827]. Pringle had briefly left London for Edinburgh but returned in 1781: DNB (J. S. G. Blair 2004). 102. Christie 1790, lot 201, and William Robertson’s History of Ancient Greece (1778), lot 183. 103. Roy 1793, xv–xvi. 104. Crawford 1949, 98. 105. Gordon 1726, 40, pl. 5; Keppie 2013, 16–17. 106. Horsley 1732, opp. p. 44. 107. Roy 1793, 63–4, pl. 11. 108. Roy 1793, 60–8. 109. Roy 1793, pl. 35; cf. Gordon 1726, and Horsley 1732, pls 1–5 between pp. 175 and 176. 110. Crawford 1949, 94. 111. Roy 1793, 102–8. 112. TNA Prob 11/1194. 113. Phillips 1980, 2–10. 114. Bowden and McOmish 2012, 35. 115. Dunbar 1992. 116. For examples of this in southern Scotland, see Halliday 2016. 117. The Antiquary, chapter 4. See Piggott 1976a; for Oldbuck’s antecedents, see Piggott 1976b.

5 The Practical and Sociable Scientist: Hypsometry and the Royal Society

A SCOT IN LONDON AND AN INTELLECTUAL HOME

I

n 1765, when William moved into his house in Great Pulteney Street, it was not altogether an easy time to be a Scot in London. Less than twenty years earlier a Jacobite army had threatened the capital, and the heads of two executed rebels were still impaled on Temple Bar. For some Londoners the Scots retained a lingering association with insurrection, Roman Catholicism and France. Only three years before, James Boswell, attending the opera at Covent Garden, had been enraged by the shouts of the mob in the gallery when two Highland officers came in: ‘No Scots! No Scots!’ His fellow countrymen were also openly discriminated against in some quarters. As late as 1777, General Alexander Mackay, from Strathtongue in Sutherland, who was the Governor of Tynemouth Castle, applied to command the forces of the East India Company, but he was turned down as the Company ‘objected to gentleman of North Britain for commands in chief’. Such treatment increased the tendency for the Scots in London to seek their own kind, as William’s new neighbour, the piano-maker John Broadwood, did in hiring his workforce.1 Even though William was identified as a Scot, in the way that the jocular newspaper snippet about his chieftainship of the Clan MacGregor had shown, he had almost certainly lost all trace of an accent. He is also very unlikely to have used Scots idioms in his speech (they are not at all evident in his writing) for these were considered a barrier to social and professional advancement. The London metropolitan norm held sway.2 Nevertheless, although it is clear that William was strongly for the King and for the Union – in the 1770s he habitually used the politically correct term ‘North Britain’, rather than Scotland – he never lost his interest in Scottish culture: his library contained more than a score of



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titles, mainly on the country’s history, which he continued to buy as late as 1789.3 He was, for instance, a subscriber to William Shaw’s Galic and English Dictionary (1780), the first full such treatment of Gaelic, and he was almost certainly one of those ‘gentlemen in London’, along with Robert Melville, who ‘with true patriotism in the republic of letters’ had established the scheme to finance its publication.4 Scots turn up often in William’s life in the capital, and he was clearly happy in their company, but there is no evidence yet that he was involved with any of the specifically Scottish organisations such as the Scots kirk, in Russell Street, or the Royal Scottish Corporation which was later based in Crane Court. He found instead a welcome and an intellectual home in The Royal Society. Founded in 1660 for the study and dissemination of natural philosophy, the Society was independent of the state but enjoyed a close relationship with it. Although it had not always lived up to its own aspirations and was to experience considerable turbulence in the 1780s, the high profile that it enjoyed enabled it to become one of the world’s great centres of scientific research and exchange, and the success of its journal, The Philosophical Transactions, had ensured that the scientific paper was now the central means of disseminating the results of that research. The Society’s motto, ‘Nullius in verba’ (a quotation from Horace, colloquially translated as ‘Take nobody’s word for it’) fitted well with William’s instinctive approach to investigation and to the use of evidence. During the ten years since his experience in the Military Survey of Scotland, William’s ideas had developed and matured. He now envisaged a much higher specification for a national cartographic survey, using very much better instruments, and this was already evident in the proposals for funding that he made in 1763 and 1766. In the latter5 he had, for instance, emphasised the need for ‘one grand Meridian line, thro’ the whole extent of the Island … by which the spheroidical form of the Earth might be still more truly determined’. In this way, he implied, a national initiative could contribute an international benefit, to Britain’s credit and advantage. While in Germany, the changing nature of engagements with the enemy will have become apparent to William: success in open battles required a wider knowledge of the terrain, and mathematically minded topographers to record it.6 He seems to have rapidly acquired some specialist expertise in the use of very much more sophisticated instruments. In August 1763, only a few months after his return to England, William began to be drawn into new intellectual circles as he became involved, peripherally, in the pursuit of the rewards that had been offered for the best method for determining longitude,

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especially at sea. With the astronomer John Bevis, he was asked by the Board of Longitude to carry out an independent assessment of four reflecting telescopes, each of which had a focal length of 2 feet: three had been made by John Bird and the fourth by James Short. This was one of several trials to select the instruments to be taken by the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, on a voyage to Barbados, during which the methods to determine longitude would be tested. William and Bevis came down firmly on the side of Short’s telescope.7 William’s reference, within his 1766 proposal, to the form of the Earth was very pertinent: this whole question had loomed large in the work of the Royal Society for some time and his advocacy of a national triangulation will have become known. It was not surprising therefore that William’s name was brought forward for election as a Fellow. The election process was in train by January 1767 and was led by James Short,8 a pupil of Colin MacLaurin who had allowed him the use of his rooms in Edinburgh to develop his craft of making scientific instruments. In due course Short had become pre-eminent in the construction of reflecting telescopes, and in 1763 he had been appointed to the committee charged with testing the timekeeper (known as H4) made by the horologist John Harrison. It was probably Short who enlisted the three other Fellows who ‘from our personal knowledge’ signed William’s election certificate:9 John Bevis; William Harrison, instrument-maker and collaborator with his father, John, in the quest for longitude; and Taylor White, a judge who was also the painstaking Treasurer of Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital.10 For William, his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in April 1767 was an invaluable endorsement of his competence and it brought him into a group of men that was to shape the rest of his life. He joined as a military Engineer with some expertise in surveying and cartography, but the Royal Society was to nurture his rapid development into a competent mathematician, man of science and geodesist. More immediately, it provided him with radical expansions of his social network and of his intellectual horizon. In the 1770s, the membership of the Society, which was dominated by physicians and surgeons,11 was certainly not restricted to what we would now think of as practising scientists who made up barely 30 per cent of the whole. Within the latter group, mathematicians and astronomers accounted for 15 per cent but engineers and surveyors for less than 4 per cent. Most Fellows were men of rank and wealth who might promulgate science and be its patrons, but they were not practitioners. (Not until the second half of the nineteenth century did the Society become an exclusively scientific institution.) There was



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also a large number of foreign members, equal in strength to about half that of the British Fellows. Election therefore provided a strong network in the upper classes and the intelligentsia – something especially advantageous for someone settling in London – but also links to the scientific community in Europe. The fields of study that were pursued by Fellows were primarily natural history, applied mathematics of all kinds (including astronomy, cartography and navigation), medicine, and chemical and electrical experiments: all sciences that contributed to Britain’s growing global economy and imperial ambitions. A constant theme was the search for mathematical ‘rules’ (both in the natural world, and in everyday life) through the accumulation of exact observations – quantitative data – especially through the use of the rapidly improving suite of scientific instruments.12 (An unlikely parallel, in quite another sphere, is provided by William’s own search for a rule to determine the holding capacity of Roman camps.) This was certainly an eventful time to be at the heart of British science. Quite apart from the projects in which he himself was involved, during William’s years as a Fellow the Society was a player in some seminal developments. These included James Cook’s voyage on the Endeavour to observe the Transit of Venus in Tahiti in 1769, and all of the advances in astronomy, geodesy and botany that flowed from this; then there was Cook’s journey to the Southern Ocean, in Resolution, in 1772; the exploration of the Arctic by Constantine Phipps in 1773; Joseph Priestley’s studies of electricity; the first published ornithological observations by Gilbert White, in 1774, leading to The Natural History of Selborne; the discovery of Uranus in 1783, and work on nebulae, by William Herschel; and the identification of comets by his sister, Caroline, in 1787. Two months before William’s election, a young landowner from Revesby in Lincolnshire, just returned from an expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador, had also been admitted as a Fellow, on the day before his twenty-fourth birthday. This was Joseph Banks13 who was destined to be the longest serving President of the Royal Society. As a schoolboy at Eton, and later in Christ Church College, Oxford, Banks had immersed himself in the study of botany that was to take him to the ends of the Earth; wealthy and intellectually omnivorous, he was to utilise his immense and infectious energy, his unrivalled networks and his powers of persuasion for the development and promotion of science of all kinds. Despite their very different backgrounds, Joseph Banks was to be one of William’s closest lifelong friends and a major influence on his social life, his active research and his legacy. Personal

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initiatives and individual networks of contacts of this kind played key roles in the science advanced by the Royal Society. From its earliest days in the 1660s, the weekly meetings of the Society had had a strong social element: free-ranging discussion across a wide field of knowledge stimulated fresh ideas, new directions and collaborative initiatives. In consequence, it was inevitable that a succession of informal dining clubs met as part of an evening’s proceedings; this was very convenient for the Fellows although it presented some problems for the hostelries involved who never knew how many diners to expect. To address this, in 1743 the members of the principal dining club (which became known as the Club of the Royal Philosophers) agreed some written rules so that the landlord of the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street could be assured of payment for the meal that he provided for them every Thursday. Members were allowed to introduce guests to the dinners, extending the range of expertise to hand and becoming an informal test of acceptability and an alternative route to Fellowship. When William became a Fellow, in 1767, the dining club was at a low ebb, but it revived in 1770–1, not least because of the return of James Cook, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander after the Endeavour voyage. In 1772, William, introduced by Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, joined the long list of those who were regularly invited as guests. James Boswell was also there that evening, not least because the President, Sir John Pringle, liked to have other Scots beside him at table.14 On a particularly memorable occasion, 12 January 1775, William was asked to dine with the club in the Mitre at the behest of Daniel Solander, the botanist and favourite pupil of Linnaeus, who had been Banks’s collaborator on the Endeavour.15 The others16 there that day were an extraordinary group; they included: the President, Sir John Pringle, from Stichill, near Kelso, who was Physician to George III; the writer and naturalist Thomas Pennant; Huang Ya Dong, who was only the fourth man from China to visit Britain; the physician and Francophile, Charles Blagden, later to be the Secretary of the Society; Joseph Banks, and Omai, the Tahitian who had travelled from the Pacific on the Endeavour; the naval officer, Arctic explorer and politician, Constantine Phipps; the brilliant chemist and physicist, Henry Cavendish, the discoverer of hydrogen, among many other things; the mathematician, Samuel Horsley who was to become Bishop of St David’s and then of St Asaph; Alexander Dalrymple, from Newhailes, in Midlothian, an explorer and hydrographer, who was about to return to work for the East India Company; and  Nevil Maskelyne. There were thirty-three of them in all, an exceptionally high number. The hearty menu – very much in the



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John Bull mould – consisted of two dishes of fish, two of ducks and two of brawn; a turkey; a fillet of veal; soup; ham; cold roast beef and two cold chickens; hashed beef; three apple pies; and stewed pears. About half a bottle of wine per head was allowed for, along with porter and spirits. The normal pattern was for the club to meet at 4.00 or 4.30 pm, providing ample time over dinner for the discussion of scientific questions and collaborations, before the Royal Society itself met at 8 pm. That July, before the club dispersed for the summer, a resolution was passed that no guest could be admitted to dinner on successive Thursdays. This considerably irritated Joseph Banks who had been a frequent diner and who had invited many guests. As a result, he instituted a separate dining club – simply called the Royal Society Club – which first met in November 1775.17 Only Banks had belonged to the Club of the Royal Philosophers, but the other founder members of the new Club – of whom William was one – evidently had well-established social networks inside and outside the Society. They were Constantine Phipps (now Lord Mulgrave); the fashionable Earl of Seaforth; Charles Blagden; John Lloyd, of Hafodunos in North Wales, who was actively interested in earthquakes and geology;18 and two who, aberrantly, never became Fellows of the Royal Society, Peter Wilhelm Edinger, from Copenhagen, and a Mr Horneman. This ‘rebellious’ club soon became very successful, somewhat at the expense of the Club of the Royal Philosophers. The new club was firmly centred around Banks, as was evident in May 1777 when it cheerfully elected him as their ‘Perpetual Dictator’. Such flippancy from the Fellows of an august learned society may seem surprising, until its source is considered. When the founder members of the club had first met in November 1775 their average age was thirty-two – the same as that of Banks himself, and the picture remained the same as the club grew. This puts a rather different complexion on the character of William who was, in comparison, a venerable forty-nine. It is easy to paint him as an exacting serious-minded man – which he was – yet here he is dining every week with much younger colleagues and clearly being welcomed by them; it says much for his social intelligence. It must have helped that Joseph Banks had a great capacity for friendship and, just as he had bonded with the sober James Cook on the Endeavour voyage, he now made it possible for an older man (William) to be comfortably included in this rarefied social setting. It was certainly exclusive: from the start the weekly charge for dinner was high – seven shillings and sixpence per head – and in December 1777 it was further resolved that any member whose income increased should pay 0.5 per cent of that uplift to the club. The following year, William, having ‘by preferment an increase

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in income of 365 pounds a year’, on his appointment as Commissary General, paid in two guineas: a little more than was actually required.19 He clearly enjoyed this company. Analysis of the detailed attendance records for the Royal Society Club20 reveals that William was one of the most consistent attendees at its weekly gatherings: between November 1775 and March 1781, he was present at ninety-seven of the 138 dinners. The other most regular diners, apart from William and Joseph Banks, were: Lord Mulgrave; Sir George Shuckburgh, who would play such a major role in investigating the determination of elevation using barometers; Captain William Calderwood, of Linhouse, in Midlothian, an astronomer, who was later to be a Lieutenant Colonel and Silver Stick;21 William’s old friend, Robert Melville, who had returned from the West Indies in 1771; John Lloyd, of Hafodunos; and Dr George Fordyce, an Aberdonian physician and chemist. It is noticeable that, of these eight, at least five were landowners or had independent means, three were army officers, and four were Scots. This was now William’s world, and although he had not been born into land and wealth, and never sought to achieve it, he had the social ability to make himself at home. HYPSOMETRY: THE SEARCH FOR A PRACTICAL RULE

Although William was by no means embarrassed by the work he had done in the Military Survey, he was acutely aware of its shortcomings: deficiencies that must have become apparent quite early on in the process. Paul Sandby’s beautiful depiction of topography had provided a great deal of information that was of use to an army officer, although the map that they produced had paid little heed to the quantification of the third dimension: elevation. The absence of this must have introduced a constant stream of minor errors in the reduction of the ground surface to plan form, contributing to the many misclosures that had to be resolved during the drawing-up each winter. Some vertical angles were taken and heights calculated, but David Dundas’s hazy recollection of these observations, fifty years later, implies that they were only occasionally made.22 The map that they produced therefore provided only limited information of the extent to which the shape of the country would facilitate or impede an army’s progress: there was no indication, for instance, whether the steepness of a road over a pass would significantly affect the time to negotiate it. In addition, accuracy in reducing a threedimensional landscape to a two-dimensional representation demanded a more robust mathematical basis than could be achieved by the traverses of the Military Survey. A sound and consistent knowledge of elevation



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was an essential component in the accurate trigonometrical surveying to which William aspired; if his proposal of a national cartographic survey was to become a reality, a simple and efficient method of recording heights would have to be found. Part of the answer was to come from the development of the barometer. In the 1640s, in Florence, Evangelista Torricelli had postulated the effects of air pressure on a tube of mercury and had suggested how this would vary in direct relation to elevation. If the difference in pressure between that on a summit and at an appropriate basedatum in the valley could be ascertained, it should be possible to determine the difference in height between them. Several practitioners took up the idea, including George Sinclair, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, who in the 1660s measured a number of summits, including Hart Fell, near Moffat, Arthur’s Seat, in Edinburgh, and Tinto, in Clydesdale.23 More experiments, using simple portable barometers, eventually followed in the Alps, and in Peru in the 1740s by Pierre Bouguer and Charles-Marie de La Condamine,24 although these pioneers had considerable difficulties in calibrating their instruments. Initially these investigations had little effect on cartography in Britain; the first attempt came in the late 1730s when a local physician named Christopher Packe, operating from a scaffold specially erected upon the top of the great tower of Canterbury Cathedral, used an azimuth compass and a theodolite of unknown type to plot the valleys in eastern Kent. He also deployed ‘two accurate upright barometers’, one at his home and the other, made more portable, to measure heights in the field. Drawing on the results of Halley and others, Packe roughly calibrated these instruments using the known height of the cathedral tower, although he accepted that there would be a margin of error of some feet in the values derived from his field observations. His resulting Philosophico-Chorographical Chart of East Kent (1743) appeared as four sheets on which many spot-heights were shown, all related to low water mark in Sandwich Bay.25 William certainly knew of Packe’s Chart, making a specific reference to it in a later paper,26 and it is highly probable that he first encountered it in 1756–7 when he surveyed the Kent coast from Whitstable to Romney Marsh and the strategic roads to Canterbury. Packe’s initiative may have sparked William’s interest in a practical exploration of this barometric approach to the measurement of heights. The breakthrough in the determination of height by hypsometry, using barometric pressure, came when Jean-André Deluc, the son of a watchmaker from Geneva, set out to identify the heights of mountains,

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using experimental physics.27 With his brother, Guillaume-Antoine, Jean-André had seen marine shells and fossils high in the Alps; a deeply religious man, he hoped that a correlation of the heights of these, from valley to valley, might lead to more information on Noah’s flood. This project developed into a major piece of work, occupying some decades, and including the construction of his own portable barometers.28 Drafts of his Recherches sur les Modifications de l’Atmosphère had been circulating for a decade before its final publication in 1772 so his approach had become well known; in his substantial book he postulated a rule for the determination of elevation that was based on the difference of the logarithms of the barometric pressure, expressed in thousandths of a French toise, at a given temperature. Corrections had to be made for variations in temperature between the summit and base stations but also for the average temperature in the column of air between the two. In proposing a rule, he had, in effect, thrown down the gauntlet to others. His move to London soon thereafter (when his business failed) helped to highlight the attraction of this topic for Fellows of the Royal Society, particularly after Deluc managed to theatrically demonstrate his expertise to the King and Queen by measuring the height of the recently completed Pagoda at Kew.29 The baton was picked up in the Royal Society by Samuel Horsley and Nevil Maskelyne, who converted Deluc’s work into British units of measurement, but the first in the field to publish new findings was Sir George Shuckburgh, who had ample private means and the leisure to take the study forward. In 1773, in Oxford, the year after he had graduated from Balliol, Shuckburgh began some serious research on hypsometry. A consequence was that for his own particular interpretation of the Grand Tour through France and Italy, in 1774–6, he equipped himself ‘with a considerable collection of instruments, or a kind of portable philosophical cabinet, which I had made expressly in London and Paris’. His instruments included two of Ramsden’s barometers; three or four thermometers; an ‘equatorial instrument’, seven inches in diameter, by Ramsden;30 a 50-feet chain of hardened steel, the length of which was checked using three 3-feet rods (two of deal and one of brass) made by Baradelle in Paris; and ‘a little bell-tent which … defended me from the wind and sun’.31 It also served to shield the instruments. Based in Geneva, he replicated Deluc’s observations on Mont Salève (1379 m), to the south of the city, taking the readings several times in order to reduce the errors. He was extremely diligent, but he was also well supported. In an expedition to the summit of Le Môle (1863 m), in the Haute Savoie, he had a party of seven or eight: this included the



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botanist, meteorologist and glaciologist, Horace Bénédict de Saussure (Deluc’s principal critic), and Jean Trembley, the assistant to the founder of the Geneva Observatory, Jacques-André Mallet, as well as servants and guides. (Despite all of this local knowledge, they still got lost on the mountain.) Less intensively, Shuckburgh made barometric observations at more than eighty places throughout France and Italy, including St Peter’s in Rome. This somewhat unusual behaviour on the part of an English aristocrat may have amused the inhabitants of Siena, Pisa and Florence, where he also took readings, and he made ten geometrical records, mostly of major summits. On his return to England, equipped with this experience and data, he had the confidence to propose a correction to Deluc’s rule.32 Hypsometry, potentially so much quicker than the geometrical method for the determination of altitude,33 was a subject that had a strong appeal for William, but in making his own response to Deluc’s Recherches he took a different approach from that of Shuckburgh. Early on in his consideration of Deluc’s rule, William noticed that even a small amount of heat would affect the length of the column of mercury in his portable barometers which were made by Jesse Ramsden, one of the finest instrument-makers of the day (Figure 5.1).34 He therefore set out (probably in 1772) on a series of exhaustive experiments35 in pursuit of the appropriate correction for a wide range of temperatures on the expansion of mercury. Of all the trials made by men of science in the 1770s and 1780s to discover the effects of temperature upon barometers, William’s have been judged ‘by far the soundest’.36 He devised an apparatus37 for heating and cooling the barometer (from freezing point to boiling point) and took elaborate precautions to eliminate or minimise any source of error (Figure 5.2). These precautions included boiling the mercury to eliminate any water dissolved in it; exploring how glass tubes and rods varied in their behaviour when chilled and heated; worrying that the tubes were not perfectly cylindrical and the effects that this might have; and progressively adapting his apparatus as he went on. Further, the instruments were allowed to stand for at least half an hour so as to acclimatise to their immediate environment before any observation was made, and the thermometers were shaded from the sun and kept away from the heat reflected by buildings.38 He took great pains to get the best results possible. His thermometer was over 4 feet long and his manometers (vertical tubes carefully calibrated to measure the pressure on a column of water) were up to 8 feet in length; and for each of the latter he had to calculate precisely the capacity of the tube and of the bulb. To protect the manometer,

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Figure 5.1 Jesse Ramsden’s portable barometers, much used by William in his hypsometry. From Roy 1777, pl. 15, opp. p. 659. © The Royal Society

he adapted the brass tubes of a large telescope which were screwed together and ‘mounted on the platform laid over the area rails’, and as his comparative observations on the expansion and condensation of mercury in Ramsden’s barometers were made in both the back parlour and the front parlour at Great Pulteney Street, out in the yard, and up ‘on the leads’ to catch the warmth of the sun,39 the whole process,

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Figure 5.2 The apparatus that William devised to investigate how much a column of mercury (and the tube containing it, as in a barometer) would expand between freezing and boiling. From Roy 1777, pl. 16, opp. p. 681. © The Royal Society

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repeated time and again, must have caused considerable disruption to his patient household. In addition to the refinements that he had made by means of his diligent experiments, William’s other significant contribution to the progress of hypsometry was to introduce meticulous terrestrial surveying practice, thus enhancing the conventional geometrical recording of those heights that had also been determined barometrically; this provided a different kind of calibration. Thitherto, in the hands of other experimenters, this aspect had been relatively unsystematic and inaccurate; now, because William had gradually built up his expertise with equipment of the best quality, every one of the bases and all of the angles of elevation in the landscape that he was recording were accurately observed by him with a high-quality astronomical quadrant made by Sisson.40 In addition to having the best instruments he was also fortunate to have had the best assistants, who would have been able to contribute to the thinking as well as to the fieldwork. In this, the camaraderie of the Royal Society paid substantial dividends: although William clearly led the project and ensured its quality, he enlisted the help of many of the friends that he had made in the Society, even though they were not specialist observers. Joseph Banks and John Ellis recorded sea levels at Bangor in North Wales in August 1773.41 Banks, with others, measured the recently completed Pagoda at Kew and also the height of Saint Paul’s; they related the latter to high water on the Thames and to the dining room of the Old Spaniard Inn, using a base measured on Hampstead Heath nearby. The Warren at Woolwich, conveniently controlled by William’s colleagues in the Board of Ordnance, was the site of a base for the measurement of Shooter’s Hill, which was about 120 m higher and 3 km to the south. In these short expeditions from London, Mulgrave, Banks and Solander helped with the fieldwork, and Blagden, Deluc and John Lloyd with the barometry. Much farther north, in Scotland, eight stations were recorded in Strathtay, between Aberfeldy and Schiehallion where Maskelyne was working in 1774; four stations were observed around Lanark, including the summit of Tinto, which had been visible from William’s birthplace at Miltonhead; and seven around Edinburgh, using Lord Alemoor’s observatory at Hawkhill (between Leith and Holyrood Park), and taking readings up to Caerketton Hill in the Pentlands. In the winter of 1774–5 and in 1776 some cold weather readings of six stations in the Pentlands were contributed by Captain Calderwood from his estate at Linhouse, Mid Calder, including the East and West Cairn Hills, to the south of Caerketton. Finally, in an attempt to observe higher altitudes in the warmest of summer weather, the height of the



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summits of Snowden and of Moel Eilio were taken relative to the quay at Caernarfon. Some of the other friends involved included James Lind, measuring Arthur’s Seat and helping to improve the apparatus, Henry Cavendish advising on the experiments and Lieutenant James Glenie assisting with the computations.42 Discussion during these collaborative bouts of fieldwork must have strengthened William’s reasoning and deductions. Overall, this was a robust process, but, in revising Deluc’s rule, William characteristically went out of his way not to criticise the man himself: If I have been obliged to differ from Mr De Luc, it is because the British observations, as well as his own (considered by their extremes) seem to authorise it: he is himself too candid to suppose that I have had criticism in view, or indeed any other object, than of contributing my mite towards the discovery of the truth, from the very good foundation which he hath already laid for it.43

In the final stages of the paper that he subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions, William had reviewed the experiments and observations that had been carried out elsewhere in the world, including those made by Sir George Shuckburgh in 1775. In response, whilst acknowledging that more work needed to be done, Shuckburgh44 identified some small discrepancies in William’s figures. They were dealing in fine distinctions: Shuckburgh had found a difference of 0.0019 inch in the expansion of a column of mercury of 30 inches for 10 degrees of heat, equating, as he said, to an error of between 3 to 5 feet in the height of Mount Etna. He also proposed a small adjustment for the expansion of air, giving an example of a consequent difference of 4 feet of elevation in a thousand. Finally, he suggested a simpler rule and provided a table illustrating the effects of these changes on sixteen of William’s observations, coming out with a smaller degree of error overall. This almost obsessive attention to detail, that both men exhibited, delivered solid and polite progress in science. Constructively collaborative in a most gentlemanly way, rather than sharply competitive, they were repeating experiments with their steadily improving instruments. Their methodology, and the trials that they had conducted, furthered the practice of physics as a whole and proved to be influential in the broader understanding of the expansion of air with heat. The research was not, of course, finished: refinements in hypsometry (including corrections for gravity and for latitude) were to continue well into the nineteenth century, building on the solid base that Deluc, William and George Shuckburgh had put in place.45

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ON SCHIEHALLION

William spent the summer of 1774 in Scotland, making barometric observations and contributing to another classic field experiment that was underway. The background to the latter was Isaac Newton’s exposition of his law of universal gravitation which had included the observation that, in addition to the pull of the Earth itself – the (hotly contested) shape of which would have its own effect – a mountain would exert its own small gravitational attraction, enough to ensure that a plumb line close to it would be minutely deflected out of the perpendicular. This, it was increasingly realised, would affect the performance of astronomical instruments if they were used for observations adjacent to mountains. To put this in context, Newton had argued that the Earth was an oblate spheroid (bulging at the Equator and flat at the poles, rather than truly spherical or elongated), and it was this contentious question of the shape of the planet that was taken up by the Académie Royale des Sciences, in Paris. Pierre Maupertuis had suggested that the Earth needed to be measured where it was thought to differ most markedly – at the Equator and at the poles – and so the Académie sponsored an expedition to part of Peru (now Ecuador) in the 1730s. Led by Pierre Bouguer, Charles-Marie de La Condamine and Louis Godin, it sought to measure a degree of latitude, and another party did the same thing in Lapland. Bouguer and his colleagues were conscious that Newton’s theory about the gravitational attraction of mountains might affect their results in the Andes, so they took some steps to investigate this and to correct for it. However, the conditions that they experienced were less than ideal and Bouguer considered that a more controlled experiment should be undertaken. Subsequently, the growing number of discrepancies in the results of the measurement of arcs in Europe, the Americas and South Africa prompted the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, to seek to understand whether some of these discrepancies had indeed been caused by the gravitational effect of adjacent mountains in the way that Newton had suggested.46 In response, a committee was set up by the Royal Society to devise a suitable experiment that would explore this idea of ‘the attraction of mountains’, and which, potentially, could also provide information on the density of the Earth. To maximise the chances of a clear result, the project needed to select a discrete mountain, preferably aligned east and west, or, alternatively, a deep valley in which the methodology of the experiment could be inverted. When Nevil Maskelyne presented an initial proposal to the Society in 1772 there were some suggestions of places that might



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have some potential: Pendle Hill in central Lancashire; the three peaks of upper Ribblesdale; or a valley between Helvellyn and Skiddaw, in Cumberland.47 Maskelyne’s paper will have attracted William’s attention; he, after all, had more knowledge of upland Britain than most (if not all) of the members of the Society in London. The initial preference was for a valley; this would make the surveying much easier as there were likely to be few problems of visibility across it. In consequence William apparently suggested that Glen Tilt, in Perthshire, might be suitable.48 This runs north from Blair Atholl and then straight north-eastwards for 10 km as a deep and dramatic cleft, up to 1.7 km wide and 400 m deep. However, in thinking about this part of the world, it is inconceivable that William would not also have proposed Schiehallion, across Glen Tummel to the south-west. One of the most distinctive peaks of the southern Highlands, it has a short east-west ridge, with steep sides to the north and south; from the eastern end of Loch Rannoch it presents an unforgettable triangular profile. Local enquiry showed that Glen Tilt was narrower than William’s memory (and the Fair Copy of the Military Survey) had suggested, and so in August 1773 the committee dispatched Charles Mason with instructions to inspect the principal hills in the Highlands in search of the right mountain. His instructions were that he should go first to Ben Nevis, and to take in the peaks in Yorkshire and Lancashire on the way home. Mason, famous for his work with Jeremiah Dixon on their eponymous Line in America, completed in 1767, was not familiar with Scotland. After stopping in Edinburgh, where he visited James Lind (who may also have pointed him to Schiehallion), he did not go to Ben Nevis but, instead, went straight to Perthshire.49 When the committee eventually considered Mason’s report, in January 1774, it decided50 that Schiehallion seemed to be ideal, and it appointed Reuben Burrow,51 until recently Maskelyne’s assistant at Greenwich, to undertake the work; it then changed its mind, and Maskelyne himself agreed to lead the fieldwork. The plan was to use a zenith sector to measure the zenith distances of stars relative to a plumb line; in this way the apparent difference in latitude could be determined between two simple observatories, which would be set up on small terraces on the northern and southern slopes of Schiehallion. The assumption was that the instrument would be affected in opposite directions by the gravitational pull towards the mountain from each observatory. If the actual plan-measurement between the two stations could then be determined, the degree of attraction that was caused by the bulk of the hill could be assessed from the difference between the apparent latitudes logged from the observation of the stars, on the one hand, and the horizontal

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distance on the ground on the other. Maskelyne also wished to record accurately the shape and size of Schiehallion so that (once he knew the amount of deflection of the plumb line) the density of the Earth could be estimated; this would help to answer whether the planet had a solid core or not. Maskelyne arrived at Schiehallion (Figure 5.3) rather later in the Scottish summer than was wise, on 30 June, having travelled up from London to Edinburgh with William.52 Burrow had come earlier, bringing with him the Society’s 10-feet zenith sector, made by Sisson (which Maskelyne had used in his observations of the Transit of Venus on St Helena), and a theodolite by Ramsden which was to be employed in the recording of the topography.53 Quite apart from the astronomical observations, which were so dependent on clear skies, the survey of the  mountain itself would have presented a significant challenge even if the weather had not been as atrocious that summer as it turned out to be. The observatories were a considerable vertical distance54 below the summit, and the quartzite sides of Schiehallion were very steep, so establishing the relative positions of the survey stations was

Figure 5.3 The topography of Schiehallion, showing the observatories on the flanks, the baselines and Burrow’s polygonal survey framework which William advised against. From Hutton 1778, 788, pl. 11 (photo: Newcastle University Special Collections: GB 186)



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a ­considerable problem, whatever survey scheme was chosen. There had to be pinpoint accuracy, and William’s advice was to measure directly across the ridge, levelling all the way, and this was accepted by Maskelyne.55 However, although Reuben Burrow was a brilliant practitioner, he was also a difficult character, not inclined to take direction from anyone; he decided instead to determine the distance between the observatories by triangulating round the mountain. Maskelyne let him have his way but by 16 August, when the topographical survey was about half complete, he wrote a letter to William in which he may have been having second thoughts.56 Burrow’s scheme entailed a ring-traverse of eighteen stations and three baselines, encompassing a polygonal area measuring about 4 km from north to south and about 7 km from east to west.57 This was large and complex enough, but William considered that the position chosen for the southern baseline was not conducive to accurate recording, and so it proved. The ground was boggy and the wooden stands that carried the measuring poles and the chain were unstable. With such risk-factors in play it was almost inevitable that many small errors were detected in the survey when the computation of the results was finally undertaken.58 An additional complication was that the exact three-dimensional size and shape of the mountain had to be recorded; Burrow devised a method by which this could be done, effectively surveying a large number of sections through the whole ridge, but this was very time-consuming. By early September the relative positions of the two observatories had still not been fixed and Maskelyne – probably regretting the decision to triangulate – asked William for the loan of his ‘telescopic level’.59 The whole process was so delayed that the Astronomer Royal did not leave Schiehallion until late October: the very beginning of winter. Nevertheless, despite all of the practical problems, he had been able to make 337 observations of forty-three stars; he had demonstrated that the attraction of mountains did exist, and that it was measurable. (The plumb line at Schiehallion was deflected by 5.8 arcsec.) This provided an important correction factor in the measurement of meridian arcs, and he had also helpfully tested the accuracy of the zenith sector.60 It was a fine piece of work and Maskelyne was later presented with the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, its highest award, for his work on the mountain. That, however, was not the end of the matter. The dataset that had been assembled during the fieldwork was large and complex, and it was not until 1778 that the brilliant mathematician Charles Hutton was able to publish his computations of the measurements taken. The limited knowledge about the composition of the mountain, and the minuscule

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deflections sought, meant that the work at Schiehallion – an excellent example of contemporary empirical science – had its limitations. Although Hutton was to take the question much further subsequently, the observations made in 1774 allowed him to conclude that the mean density of the Earth was at least double that at its surface and that, in consequence, the core of the Earth was solid.61 During his own visit to Schiehallion, William had measured the heights of the southern observatory, of the western summit, and of the southern baseline; he then left the mountain on 15 July, taking his Ramsden barometers down to Weem, near Aberfeldy, to measure the heights of a number of minor summits there.62 While Maskelyne was living in a bothy beside the southern observatory, William was probably staying in comfort with the Menzies of Weem at Castle Menzies, along with another visitor to the project, James Stuart Mackenzie, the Lord Privy Seal, a keen astronomer. By 26 July William was back with his mother and his sister Susan in Lanark; and there he remained, making short expeditions to record heights with his barometers on the summit of Tinto and in central Clydesdale, until September. On the way home, in a rapid but temporary switch in focus, he took the opportunity to complete some unfinished business from The Military Antiquities by surveying more accurately the complex palimpsest of Roman earthworks on the English Border at Chew Green.63 GREENWICH AND OTHER COMMITMENTS

One of the consequences of William’s work at Schiehallion was that astronomical matters began to take up more of his time in London. The Royal Observatory, a few miles downriver at Greenwich, had been founded in 1675 to assemble the astronomical data that was required to solve the problem of how to determine longitude. The particular focus was on the lunar distance method which provided a calculation of time difference through a comparison of the local time against a predictable event at a reference meridian by observing the movement of the moon against the background of the stars.64 However, the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, and his successors exhibited some reluctance to publish their observations in a timely way. In 1710 these continual delays prompted Sir Isaac Newton, the President of the Royal Society, to  petition Queen Anne to appoint a Board of Visitors who would supervise the work of the Observatory and ensure that the observations were published. As a result, a Royal Warrant directed that the Society’s President and selected members of its Council should form



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the new Board. This Warrant was renewed in 1765, shortly after Nevil Maskelyne became Astronomer Royal, and he was the first postholder to commit to regular and frequent publication of his results.65 On William’s election to the Society’s Council in 1774 he became one of the Visitors, and thus a part of Maskelyne’s strengthened management regime. On 8 December he was detailed to join ‘a Visitation of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and the instruments therein, on Wednesday next the 14th’. The other participants were: the President (Sir John Pringle); Sir Joseph Banks; the lawyer Sir James Burrow, twice an interim President; Henry Cavendish; Constantine Phipps; and William Watson, the physicist and naturalist, and the physician to the Foundling Hospital. The Visitors found that the records of the observations were in good order; they made an inventory of the instruments and their condition; and they received from the Astronomer Royal a list of the improvements that he proposed.66 This was typical of Maskelyne’s long period in office, which lasted until his death in 1811, and which was to be well used in tightening up and consolidating the whole business of observations at Greenwich, providing a sounder base for the Observatory’s future.67 As one of the Visitors, William cannot be said to have been an assiduous attendee during the next four years, although the Board was later to become a body of great importance to him. In the meantime, he found that his knowledge of instruments was frequently made use of at Greenwich: in the March and May of 1775, he and Constantine Phipps were asked by the Board of Longitude to appraise a quadrant and a sextant that had been divided (engraved with graduations on a scale) by a new dividing engine made by Jesse Ramsden. Ramsden was a pioneer in this exacting technology and the decisions of William and his colleagues were favourable. As a result, the Board awarded Ramsden £300 for his invention and they also bought the engine.68 William already had two of Ramsden’s barometers, which were performing well, and so the trials of these instruments left the instrument-maker and his assessor with every reason to respect each other’s judgement and expertise. A decade later, this was to become very relevant. William was increasingly busy. Any commitment to Greenwich had to compete with his work on hypsometry, and that April the tension in America had boiled over at the battles of Lexington and Concorde, effectively marking the beginning of the American War of Independence. In June he wrote to James Lind, in Edinburgh: ‘American affairs look muddy; we may possibly have something else to do than observe barometers.’69 The pressure on him would certainly have increased further that October when he was appointed Superintendent of Stores for the

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Forces in North America. Before that, however, he found time to accept an invitation to a dinner hosted by Nevil Maskelyne. The guest of honour was Captain James Cook, home after his second voyage, but restless. Joseph Banks and Constantine Phipps had had to send their apologies, but the other guests were all Fellows of the Royal Society and well known to William: Sir John Pringle, the President, who was the Physician to the King; Daniel Solander, the Swedish botanist who had been on the Endeavour voyage; and the painter and architect, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart who was the Surveyor of Greenwich Hospital.70 William had a rather different set of skills from any of them (apart from Cook), although his neatly complemented theirs, and, all in all, the dinner guests had ample overlapping interests for the conversation to flow. Maskelyne clearly enjoyed William’s company and, even before their expedition to Schiehallion, he respected the high standards of his experiments and research. William’s election to the Society’s Council had, at the age of forty-eight, secured for him a position in the hierarchy of London’s scientific community, a status that was reflected by his presence around Maskelyne’s table. It was two months later that, as we have seen, Joseph Banks founded his rebellious dining club within the Royal Society, and its weekly meetings must have been a welcome release and diversion for William from the intricate and onerous logistics of the war in America. Another potential social opportunity presented itself when he was elected to the Society of Antiquaries in March 1776. The Antiquaries had held an annual dinner since 1737 but in 1774 the Society started a weekly dining club which was limited to two dozen members and only met from January to April.71 Guests were permitted but William seems to have stayed loyal to the Royal Society Club; the company of the young bloods there was probably much more lively and entertaining, and more relevant to his life at that point, than that provided by the Antiquaries. The American Declaration of Independence in July 1776 and Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga in the October of the following year underlined how, despite some successes, the war in America was not flowing Britain’s way; this must have caused considerable strain to William and his colleagues in London. To add to this, in July 1777 he received the news that his mother, Mary, had died.72 Her exact age was not recorded but she must have been in her mid-seventies, a good lifespan for the late eighteenth century. Despite living for nearly thirty years as a widow in Lanark, she was buried in the old churchyard at Carluke, presumably alongside her husband, John. Other aspects of William’s life were more positive. In August 1777, he was promoted73



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to the rank of Colonel in the army, and this was the year in which his paper on hypsometry – his first formal publication – appeared in the Philosophical Transactions. In presenting his results he had, characteristically, taken great pains to meet his own exacting standards: the compilation and the proofing of a paper74 of 135 printed pages, containing hundreds of figures (taken to three places of decimals), both within the text and in two dozen tables, was no mean undertaking. He also included within the paper a map of the triangles measured between Snowdon and the sea at Caernarfon, an illustration of Ramsden’s portable barometers (Figure 5.1), and another of his apparatus for the heating and cooling of a column of mercury. These he must have drawn himself, most meticulously, before they were finely engraved by James Basire. In February 1778 France recognised the independence of the colonists in America and entered the war; Spain joined the alliance against Britain in 1779, and Gibraltar came under a siege that lasted four years; France attacked Jersey and, across the Atlantic, captured St Vincent. Although physically distant from these military engagements, William was in the thick of it: appointed as Commissary General in June 1778, his key role in procurement meant that he was playing a significant part in the efficient running of the state. He also had other concurrent tasks, as an Engineer, in the defence of the realm. With France and Spain ranged against Britain, the risk and fear of invasion were real, and so the training and the public display of the troops in the camps (such as those at Coxheath and Warley) that William now helped to establish in the south-east of England were important bolsters of public confidence.75 This pressure of work was bound to take its toll. ARGYLL STREET

In London, Joseph Banks was elected as President of the Royal Society in November 1778,76 defeating the only other candidate, Alexander Aubert, a wealthy director of the London Assurance Company and an assiduous astronomer. The elevation of Banks increased his divided loyalty between the Society’s two dining clubs, but the rebellious Royal Society Club that he had created still carried on. However, William’s attendance at the Club77 fell off during the winter of 1779–80: of the eleven dinners between December and March he only attended two, and the same thing happened the next winter when, of the nine dinners that were held between January and March 1781, he was only present at two. In the first of these winters he was certainly too unwell to attend.

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On 31 January 1780 he wrote78 to Charles Jenkinson, the Secretary at War in Lord North’s government: Colonel Roy presents his compliments to Mr Jenkinson, having, after a very long illness, had a relapse, by which he is still confined to the house, he is apprehensive that it may not be in his power to have the honour of waiting on him on the 12th of Feb’y.

He was presumably suffering from the same condition that he had first mentioned after that very cold winter of 1765–6 in Dunkirk; his letter to Jenkinson reveals just how debilitating it was. Three months later, in March 1781, the members of the Royal Society Club resolved that it was no longer expedient for them to continue their weekly meetings and that in future the Club would meet only once a year. At their last dinner, in June 1784, there were eleven around the table, including William and his friends Constantine Phipps (Lord Mulgrave), Robert Melville, Charles Blagden, John Lloyd and William Calderwood.79 Thereafter, the erstwhile rebels dined with the Club of the Royal Philosophers. By 1779 William had been living in Great Pulteney Street for fourteen years and he was well established in the capital. He now decided to move nearly 500 metres to the north-west, buying the freehold to what is now no. 10 Argyll Street.80 This residential street had been laid out in the 1730s on the estate of the second Duke of Argyll; indeed, three doors down stood Argyll House which in 1779 was in the hands of John Campbell, the Fifth Duke. It was not the most fashionable area, but it was solidly respectable, attracting a number of senior army officers and doctors. William’s neighbours included (at no. 3) Donald Monro, the medical writer and army physician who had been in Germany during the Seven Years War; Dr Francis Milman, physician to George III (no. 33), and Colonel Francis Richardson and General Abednego Matthews (nos 22 and 26). At no. 5 was Lady Clive, the widow of ‘Clive of India’; she had been born Margaret Maskelyne and was the sister of the Astronomer Royal. She shared some of her brother’s interests and had a sizable collection of scientific instruments. William’s predecessors in his house included Sir John Cust, the MP for Grantham, who was later to be Speaker of the House of Commons, and Colonel Sir Jeffrey Amherst, a very successful (though controversial) army commander in Canada during the Seven Years War. When William moved in in 1779, Amherst was Lieutenant General of the Ordnance. Although now gutted for office accommodation, the house still stands – bearing a Blue Plaque for William – and is one of two survivors from the eighteenth-century development. Apart from Argyll House,



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Figure 5.4  A watercolour by George Stanley Repton depicting the bland façade of the Argyll [Concert] Rooms in Little Argyll Street c. 1815, before Regent Street was driven through. Beyond, in Argyll Street, is William’s house in its original form, with a fanlight over the front door and railings outside; one bay to the left is hidden from view. The timber structure above the mansard roof may be a remnant of his observatory. Artokoloro/Alamy

it had the widest frontage on the street (8.5 m) and was a classic town house, three bays wide (Figure 5.4), consisting of four floors above a basement, with an entrance hall and stairs on the right-hand side of the elevation, and two rooms, one behind the other, on each floor. The main reception rooms would have been on the first floor, the dining room on the ground floor and the kitchen in the basement.81 The whole was insured for £2100.82 William’s home had ‘a well constructed observatory’ and contained ‘elegant household furniture, fine prints, [a] valuable library of books, a capital assortment of mathematical and astronomical instruments, maps, etc, china, linen, choice wines and other effects’.83 Although only ‘fine prints’ are mentioned, it is probable that – given the time that William had spent with Paul Sandby – the walls were also decorated with oil paintings and watercolours, some of which may have been by William himself. One of his that has survived depicts the ‘Roman’ bridge on the Antonine Wall at Duntocher, an image from his tour in 1755 that was not thought sharp enough to be engraved

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for inclusion in the published edition of The Military Antiquities.84 That William continued to paint from time to time is suggested by him owning ‘a complete Storer’s delineator and stand of the most improved construction’: this was a camera obscura, a simple piece of equipment, in common use by the artists of the day (including Thomas Sandby), which would have helped him to capture an image.85 Whatever the complexity or simplicity of its internal arrangements and decoration, William’s house was a substantial one which would have required an appropriate number of servants – a cook, and probably a housekeeper, and at least one kitchen maid and a chambermaid – whose living quarters will have been in the basement or on the top floor, as appropriate. The only one recorded by name was ‘my faithful servant John Stewart’ who evidently stayed with William for a long time.86 It is quite possible that he was related to William, on his mother’s side, although, other than the identical surname, there is no direct evidence for this. Servants – even if they were relatives – were always invisible, and it was no different in Argyll Street, but it is likely that John Stewart accompanied William on almost all of his expeditions, caring for barometers or holding surveying staves, as required. An additional top floor and a two-storey rear extension were added to the house in 1915, and it was presumably at this point that one of the features of the house was destroyed: the observatory. This was probably a solid timber structure, sufficient to shelter the observer and his instruments, and it is likely to have been added by William. There were a number of observatories87 on the roofs of houses in London at that time: the best equipped was that belonging to Alexander Aubert, first installed at Loampit Hill in Deptford in 1769, which had a transit instrument and a quadrant, both made by John Bird. In 1790, after his move to Highbury, Aubert added the equatorial sector by Jesse Ramsden that had belonged to William.88 The inclusion of such an instrument in William’s inventory suggests that his observatory in Argyll Street was extremely well equipped: he certainly also had a brass quadrant and a 12-inch astronomical quadrant by Sisson; 10-inch and 3-feet reflector telescopes by his friend James Short; a 40-inch reflector by Thomas Short; and 3-feet and 1-foot achromatic telescopes by Jesse Ramsden.89 His clocks included a regulator with a compound pendulum by the Scottish watchmaker Alexander Cumming,90 of New Bond Street, and another regulator by John Hallifax of Barnsley. All of these instruments were of the highest quality. Beyond the instruments themselves, there is little indication of how much William observed the heavens for their own sake or whether he



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was interested only in what they could tell him about the shape of the Earth (Chapter 6). In his library he certainly had classic texts covering both of these topics, including those by de La Caille, James Ferguson, Lalande and Flamsteed; he also had Nevil Maskelynes’s Tables, his report on observations at Greenwich since 1765, and runs of astronomical almanacs: the Connaissance des Temps, the Nautical Almanac and Ephemerides des Mouvements Célestes pour le Meridien de Paris.91 He also had simpler items, such as an astronomical broadside by Benjamin Martin and planispheres by Samuel Dunn.92 He clearly kept up with developments in astronomy, not least with the star catalogues and discoveries of William Herschel93 in the 1780s – which included Uranus, binary and multiple stars, and new moons around Saturn – but this seems to have been born more of an informed interest rather than a deep and active engagement. Compared to what it was to become in the nineteenth century, London at that time was still relatively small, and London society in the West End was closely compact. A mile to the north and west of Argyll Street, beyond the Euston Road and Hyde Park, the fields and the villages began.94 Nevertheless, how far William enjoyed the company of his neighbours is unknown; he does not appear in the famous diaries of the day, such as those of James Boswell and Fanny Burney, and he probably had little time for small talk. He was, however, interested in current affairs, and in his politics he voted with his adopted tribe.95 In 1774, when he was in Great Pulteney Street, he had cast his ballot in favour of two serving army officers in the election for the Westminster constituency: Hugh Percy (Lord Warkworth) and Thomas Pelham Clinton (Lord Lincoln)96 who easily defeated the Wilkite candidates. In 1780, from Argyll Street, his vote went to Admiral Rodney who, long before, had been on the raid on Rochefort and who had more recently defeated the Spanish at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. Rodney was elected, but William’s other vote went again to Lord Lincoln who this time fell to Charles James Fox, the prominent Whig who opposed the power of the King and who had railed against Lord North’s conduct of the war in America. Although, apart from his voting record, there is no further information about his opinions, William’s interest in politics (or at least in the conduct of government) is illustrated by his having thirty-three volumes of the Journal of the House of Commons on his shelves.97 Of William’s views on the other topic unmentionable in polite society – religion – there is no inkling. Despite his father being an Elder of the kirk in Carluke and his brother James becoming an ordained

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­ inister, William seems to have passed it by; his faith, if it existed at m all, may have been no more than a conventional one.98 The list of the volumes in his library99 contains no devotional books whatever, not even a Bible. There was little then, perhaps, to cushion the blow that fell in April 1780 when he heard that his sister Susan had died.100 She was fifty-one. In a penultimate Will, he had evidently made his ‘much beloved sister’ his principal legatee, and now this last link to his childhood had gone. Intimations of mortality must have grown in his mind: although his mother had survived into her seventies, his father had also been fifty-one when he died, and James had been only thirty-seven. What now did Susan’s death suggest for his own life expectancy, at fifty-three? There was much that he still wished to do. The Royal Society or an occasional game of chess101 probably took William’s mind off such things, and his research projects will have absorbed most of his spare time, much of which will have been spent in his library. What we know of the contents of this room reflects his life, his interests and the publications of his friends. A total of 573 titles were included in the sale102 that James Christie eventually conducted in 1790, although 245 of these were beneath the notice of the auctioneer and were not specifically named. Ancient history and antiquities were well represented, as were astronomy, science, mathematics and instruments. Military engineering, tactics and military practice had a special place, and his collection of the Army Lists – twenty-six volumes ‘elegantly bound in morocco’ – indicates what he really cared about. The history and topography of Scotland were particularly well accounted for, as was travel and exploration (including Cook’s voyages), a wide topic that he found increasingly absorbing towards the end of his life. A substantial number of titles – perhaps as much as a quarter of the whole – were in French, and his fluency in this was to be of crucial importance in his last decade. Overall, most of his books were published after 1750 but a dozen had appeared in the seventeenth century, the earliest being John Bingham’s 1616 edition of Aelian’s Tactics: this treatise included substantial sections on drill and on the constitution of the Roman army, and William probably used it extensively when drafting the The Military Antiquities. His reading matter evidently ranged widely, from pamphlets to Sir William Hamilton’s sumptuous Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies (1776), one of the most lavish books of the eighteenth century.103 There were runs of the Annual Register, of the Public Advertiser and of La Bigarure (a French miscellany) – three subscriptions that kept him up to date with current affairs – of the Philosophical Transactions of the



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Royal Society, and of Archaeologia from the Society of Antiquaries. More surprising, perhaps, was the run of twenty-six volumes of The Vegetable System by the prolific and controversial John Hill, which appeared between 1759 and 1775, and various books on building, architecture and perspective. There was reading related to aspects of his work, such as Pierre Faulconnier on the history of Dunkirk (1730) and Thomas James on Gibraltar (1771), and accounts of military expeditions in North America and Germany. Other titles he probably picked up through the enthusiasm of his friends, including de Keralio’s book on glaciers in Switzerland (1770, perhaps stimulated by conversations with Jean-André Deluc) and Harry Verelst on the English government in Bengal (1772, probably through James Rennell). There were works on hydraulics and optics, and on the fireworks that he would use so effectively across the Channel in the 1780s; philosophy was there in titles by Locke, Hume, Montesquieu and Rousseau, but there was poetry only from Thomson and Pope. A small but solid stock of reference works included dictionaries of Latin, French, German, geography, and the arts and sciences, as well as Samuel Johnson’s great Dictionary of the English Language. More difficult to enumerate and to characterise are all the books that William read simply for pleasure. There was certainly Charles Sablier’s Variétés Sérieuses et Amusantes (1769), the works of Jonathan Swift, and two picaresque novels, Les Aventures de Gil Blas (1749) and The Adventures of Alonso (1775) which was the first novel by an American writer (Thomas Atwood Digges). More surprising by its presence is The Ring, a Novel in a Series of Letters by a Young Lady (1784), the publication of which prompted a comment in The Monthly Review: ‘This is said to be the production of a very young lady. She appears, however, to be so well acquainted with the tricks of the profession that one would be led to imagine that she had been an old practitioner.’ Indeed, there seems to have been more light reading to hand in William’s library than might at first be expected: the lot in the 1790 sale that was headed by Alonso also contained ‘48 more’, so perhaps Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones and Roderick Random were there too. William’s collection of maps104 must also have been a source of endless diversion in which he could lose himself from time to time. For many years he had been an assiduous subscriber105 to county maps, thereby assisting their production. In consequence, he had a full coverage of the counties of England and Scotland (the mapping that he had hoped to incorporate within a national survey in 1766) including sixteen volumes, half-bound. Other material consisted of eight maps of

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England, on rollers; town plans from England and Ireland; and nineteen proof copies of his own Mappa Britanniae Septentrionalis, the sheet that he had produced for the Military Antiquities. There were also road books, containing the sort of strip-maps that he himself had made in south-east England in the later 1750s, comprising: two volumes covering Scotland, bound in red leather; John Ogilby’s Britannia (1675); Taylor and Skinner’s maps of the roads of Ireland (1777); and Daniel Paterson’s British Itinerary (1785). William’s special interest in coastal cartography was triumphantly represented by The Atlantic Neptune, the huge and vastly expensive atlas of the shores of North America by Colonel Joseph Des Barres that was published between 1774 and 1782.106 More modestly, there were Mackenzie’s sheets detailing the coasts and harbours of Ireland and western Britain, and charts of the Channel Islands. Farther afield, William had some bound maps of America, and dozens of sheets from the Cassini survey of France, the scheme that he wished to emulate and surpass; there were also maps of the island of Fyn, in Denmark, by Caspar Wessell (1780) and of southern Norway by Erik Pontoppidam; and military maps of operations in North America and in Germany (presumably including copies of some of his own productions, such as Minden and Einbeck). The oldest maps107 in his collection were those in Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion (1612), peopled with personifications of settlements throughout the English counties, and those in the celebrated atlas of North America, America Septentrionalis, published by Henricus Hondius in 1636. At the other end of the date range, William’s youngest map was described in the Christie catalogue of 1790108 as ‘a map of Kent, with the extension of the triangles from the observatory of Greenwich to the coast of France’. It was the project represented by this map that was to occupy much of the final seven years of William’s life.

NOTES 1. Boswell 1950, 71–2; Fortescue 1928, 438–9; Wainwright 1982, 28, 65, 69–70. 2. Jones 1997, 267–73. 3. Christie 1790. 4. Shaw 1780, 7. The other subscribers included Robert Adam, Joseph Banks, James Boswell, Hugh Debbieg, Samuel Johnson, Allan Ramsay and George Shuckburgh. 5. Fortescue 1927, 331. For earlier ideas of a national survey, see Close 1969, xxi–xxii.



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6. HC4, 950 (V. Pansini). 7. The Board disagreed. ‘Account of John Harrison and his chronometer’, State Library of Victoria, H17809, ff. 97–8 (accessible in the Cambridge Digital Library). 8. DNB (T. Clarke 2004); Taylor 1966, 190–1; Turner 1970. 9. Royal Society Archives EC/1767/02. 10. Bevis: DNB (A. M. Clerke and A. McConnell 2008). John and William Harrison: DNB (A. King 2008). The Governors of the Foundling Hospital included William Harrison and Jeremiah Dixon (elected 1760) and Robert Melville (1772): Nichols and Wray 1935, 313, 238, 374–5, 385. For White, see also Lysaght 1971, 103–7. 11. Lyons 1939, 109–13, 116, 119; Carter 1988, 573. 12. Sorrenson 1996, 33–41. 13. Carter 1988 is the fullest biography. 14. William was elected to the Club of the Royal Philosophers five years later, alongside another Scot, Alexander Dalrymple. Geikie 1917, 118, 127, 139. 15. Allibone 1976, 94. 16. For Solander, see Duyker 1998; for Huang Ya Dong, see de Bruijn 2011; for the others, DNB. 17. Allibone 1976, 106–16. 18. For Lloyd’s extensive correspondence with Banks, see Dawson 1958, 546–55. 19. Royal Society Archives Add MS 32445 (Royal Society Club 1775–84), 13 February and 18 December 1777, 9 July 1778. 20. Royal Society Archives Add MS 32445. Other regular attendees included Owen Putland Meyrick, Robert Shuttleworth and Richard Kaye. 21. Dennistoun 1842, 394–8, 402. 22. NRS RH1/2/523. 23. DNB (J. Anderson and A. McConnell 2009); Craik 2018. 24. HC4, 161–2 (O. Chapius), 718–19 (N. Safier), 727–31 (M. R. Hoare). 25. Packe 1743, 2, 9,91–6. HC4 (M. Charlesworth), 1090–1. 26. Roy 1787, 192. 27. Feldman 1985. 28. Heilbron 2005, 75–9; Hübner 2011, 24; Ratcliff 2011, 47–9. 29. Heilbron 2005, 82–3, where it is suggested that the King may have consulted William about the accuracy of Deluc’s instruments and methods, thus setting him off on his assessment of the whole subject of hypsometry. 30. A telescope on an equatorial mount which could be used to measure zenith and altitude; McConnell 2007, 27, 310, fig. 5.6. Shuckburgh 1777, 516. 31. Shuckburgh 1777, 513, 515. 32. Shuckburgh 1777, 574–6. 33. HC4, 618–21 (M. C. Hammer).

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34. McConnell 2007, 164–7; Close 1969, 7. 35. Roy 1777, 653, 658–715. Some of William’s notes on his experiments in 1773–7 survive in TNA: OS 3/3. 36. Middleton 1964, 179. 37. Roy 1777, pl. 16, opp. p. 680. ‘I have been engaged for some time past in making experiments on the expansion of the Mercury, which I have after much plague and trouble ascertained at last’ (Close 1969, 8). 38. Close 1969, 8. 39. TNA OS 3/3: Register of two of Ramsden’s barometers … February 1774; Roy 1777, 709, 659, 674. Observations were also made at an address in Philpot Lane, in the City of London, presumably linked to one of his collaborators (Roy 1777, 701). 40. Cf. Christie 1790, 19, lot 16. For William’s geometric records: Roy 1777, 785–6. He was not immune to making mistakes, but he did own up to them and sought the cause: Close 1969, 6. 41. Letter from Banks to William 7 October 1773: TNA OS 3/3. 42. For the barometric observations in Britain: Roy 1777, 715–27, 760–2, 773–80; TNA OS 3/3. Staying at his mother’s house in Lanark, he recorded the height relative to high water, neap tide, at Glasgow: Close 1969, 8. 43. Roy 1777, 717–18, 773–86, 672–3, 720, 751, 768. 44. Shuckburgh 1778. 45. Feldman 1985, 152, 177–95. 46. Forbes 1975, 143–7. 47. Maskelyne 1775a. 48. Maskelyne to James Lind, 3 August 1773 (Royal Society Archives MS Ma 244/12), quoted in Danson 2006, 106, 269; Howse 1989, 131–2. 49. Danson 2006, 105–9, 115, 269, quoting a letter from Maskelyne to James Lind, 3 August 1773: Royal Society Archives MS Ma 12. 50. Maskelyne 1775b, 502–3. 51. For a biographical account of Burrow, see Phillimore 1945, 155–67. 52. Those who they met during a brief stay in the capital (TNA OS 3/2) included: William Robertson, the Principal of Edinburgh University; John Hope, the Professor of Botany and Materia Medica; Sir George Clerk Maxwell, who had assisted William in the discovery of Roman camps in Annandale; and one of the other Commissioners of Customs, Archibald Menzies of Culdares. From Edinburgh, William went to see his mother and sister in Lanark before travelling to Perthshire. 53. For the instruments, see Maskelyne 1775b 500–1, and Howse 1989, 232–4; for the zenith sector, see Howse 1989, 34–7. 54. William established that the southern observatory was 1183 ft (360.5 m) below the western summit: Roy 1777, 721–2. For the surviving remains, see Morris and Pudsey 2008, but note that in every case the National Grid prefix should be NN.



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55. Weld 1848, 80. 56. Close 1969, 7; TNA OS 3/2. 57. Hutton 1778, tab. XI; the scheme has been graphically reconstructed by Danson 2006, 132. 58. Maskelyne 1775b, 521–3. For the computations, see Hutton 1778, 711– 13. 59. Close 1969, 8. 60. Reeves 2009. 61. Hutton 1778, summarised by Davies 1985, and by Danson 2006, 151–4. 62. Roy 1777, 721–4, 775; Close 1969, 7. 63. Macdonald 1917, pl. 30. 64. For the history of the pursuit of longitude, see Andrewes 1998, and Dunn and Higgitt 2014. 65. Laurie 1966, 169–80. 66. Cambridge University Library Archives RGO 6/21, item 159: Minutes of the Board of Visitors of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich 1710–84. The report to the Council is at RGO 6/22, 129–34. 67. For Maskelyne and his world, see Higgitt 2014 and Howse 1989; for him as a manager, see Reeves 2014. 68. In June 1777 he and William Calderwood examined a scale which had been processed in the same way. Cambridge University Library Archives RGO 14/5: Papers of the Board of Longitude, 271, 277, 318–19. McConnell 2007, 43–4. 69. Close 1969, 8. 70. Duyker and Tingbrand 1995, 359–60. 71. Evans 1956, 163, 445–6. 72. OPR Deaths 629/00 0020 0061 Carluke. 73. TNA OS 3/410. 74. Roy 1777. 75. See Chapter 3. 76. Lyons 1944, 197–200; Carter 1988, 146–7. 77. Royal Society Archives Add MS 32445. 78. BL Add MS 38213 f. 106. 79. Royal Society Archives Add MS 32445. 80. The house was at that time no. 12. Sheppard 1963, 284–307; Nenadic 2010, 31–2. 81. Floor plans and sections are in the Historic England Archive: MD 96/04210; cf. Stewart 2006, 42, 48–9. 82. London Metropolitan Archives, Sun Insurance Offices Policy Registers (Old Series), MS 11936/363/556678. 83. The description is from James Christie’s puff for the sale of the house and its contents (The World, 16 August 1790). There are no records in Christie’s archives that this sale ever took place. 84. Macdonald 1917, 172, 213–14, pl. 28; Keppie 2004, 193–5.

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85. Christie 1790, 20, lots 33, 39; Bonehill and Daniels 2009, 23, 49, 88–9, 170, 176–7. William may also have replicated maps using this equipment. 86. John Stewart was bequeathed £50, ‘my wearing apparel and body linen’ in William’s Will of 1786: TNA Prob 11/1194. 87. Howse 1986, 69, 74, 76–7. Howse only listed those that had permanently fixed instruments; smaller-scale installations – the number of which is not known – included those owned by Henry Cavendish and by William. 88. For Aubert, see DNB (A. M. Clerke and Anita McConnell 2012); Christie 1790, 19, lot 27, for which Aubert paid the enormous sum of 135 guineas. 89. Christie 1790, 18–20; Harley and Walters 1977, 13–17. 90. Cumming was probably from Duthil, near Carrbridge on the upper Spey; by 1752 he was working for the 3rd Duke of Argyll at Inveraray before moving to London; he later conducted experiments in hypsometry: DNB (G. Clifton 2008). William owned a copy of Cumming’s Elements of Clock and Watch-work (1766): Christie 1790, lot 98. 91. Christie 1790, lots 9, 54, 48, 162, 121, 135, 141, 121, 135, 12, 13. 92. Christie 1790, 20. 93. In September 1789 William wrote to Herschel, introducing Colonel Johnston who wished to see Herschel’s ‘wonderful telescope’ and referring to ‘your late discoveries’: Royal Astronomical Society Archives 13. R.13. 94. See, for instance, Bowles’s Reduced New Pocket Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster … 5th edn, 1783. 95. Westminster Poll Books, Westminster City Archives, 324.42; Harvey, Green and Corfield 1998, 40, 43–4. 96. They were to become, respectively, the 2nd Duke of Northumberland and the Duke of Newcastle. 97. Christie 1790, lot *226. He also had a copy of Bolingbroke’s Political Tracts (1760) which advocated giving more power to the King rather than to political parties. 98. In his final Will he commended his ‘soul into the hands of Almighty God, my Creator’ and mentioned ‘William Purdie of the 39th Regiment of Foot, my Godson, who is also my half cousin’ [my emphasis]. 99. Christie 1790. The auctioneer may not have considered any religious books to have been notable enough to catalogue, but still their total omission is surprising. 100. OPR Deaths 629/00 0020 0293 Carluke; ‘best Mort Cloth to Susan Roy in Lanark [10 shillings]’. 101. Christie 1790, lot 189 was Danican Philidor’s Analysis of the Game of Chess (1777). 102. Christie 1790. See also Harley and Walters 1977. 103. At 12 guineas, this achieved the highest price for a single book in the sale: Christie 1790, lot 225.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

The Practical and Sociable Scientist 201 Christie 1790, 11, 13, 14, 20–2. Wallis and Wallis 1993, 118, 163–9. HC4, 132–3 (S. J. Hornsby). Christie 1790, lots 150, 144. Christie 1790, 12, 21.

6 The Geodesist: Large Triangles and Minuscule Adjustments

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION

B

y the early spring of 1782 it was sixteen years since William had left France after his assessment of the demolition of the port at Dunkirk. He had sailed home from Calais in a fishing boat, in the company of the British ambassador to the French Court: Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond. The two men had had radically different lives. At the age of fifteen, Richmond had inherited the family estate at Goodwood, in Sussex, between Chichester and the South Downs. After a Grand Tour, marriage in 1757, and a short career in the army – he distinguished himself at Minden – he had set out to improve and to enlarge his estate. He had inherited 1,100 acres (450 hectares), but during his lifetime he increased this to 17,000 acres (6,900 hectares); he built new stables, designed by William Chambers, and he planted huge numbers of trees. Realising that his rapidly expanding property would be much more efficiently managed if he had proper records of the landholdings, in 1758 he engaged Thomas Yeakell as a salaried surveyor for the estate, a highly unusual (and probably unique) appointment. In 1770, Yeakell entered into commercial practice with William Gardner, a Sussex man who had started out as a surveyor three years before. They mainly worked for the Duke, but in 1778 they had published the first of the four sheets of their great map of Sussex: this was at a scale of two inches to the mile (about 1:32,000) and sufficiently detailed to show field boundaries. Its longitudes were measured from the meridian of Greenwich and its preparation probably incorporated some trigonometrical survey. Although it was never finished, this ambitious and highly professional scheme was to have a profound influence on the future direction of British cartography. It impressed Richmond so much



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that when he went to the Board of Ordnance in 1782, he took Yeakell with him, giving him the post of Chief Draughtsman in the Tower Drawing Room. Gardner was to join him later, subsequently becoming Chief Surveying Draughtsman.1 Since his return from France, Richmond’s political career had been spent mainly in opposition. In the 1770s he espoused unpopular causes, resisting Lord North’s plans to reform the East India Company, criticising the conduct of the war in America, and supporting independence for the colonists. He also advocated parliamentary reform, including greater equality in the size of constituencies and a wider suffrage, but his timing was unfortunate and he made no headway. Now, in 1782, after a long estrangement from the King (caused by his tactless petulance in resigning a position at Court), Richmond re-entered the Cabinet as Master General of the Ordnance. This happy turnaround was partly the result of the King’s resistance to political parties and his insistence that members of the opposition should join the administration. The appointment to the powerful Board of Ordnance proved to be one of the most productive roles in Richmond’s life: he instituted various reforms and made the Ordnance an efficient and effective element in the armed services. With a Master General now in post who was well known to William – and one, moreover, who had an interest in extensive, small-scale mapping – the times must have seemed propitious for a revival of the proposals for a national cartographic survey, but other, more immediate commitments frustrated any attempt that William might have made to push matters forward. He had been made a Major General in the army in October 1781 and this seniority inevitably entailed the frequent provision of advice to the administration. An example of this was the evidence that William gave to the Commissioners appointed to examine the Public Accounts; although the war in America was still dragging on, the Commissioners began an inquiry about aspects of the expenditure laid out for it. Specifically, they were examining whether funds had been fraudulently syphoned off or improper profits made, especially within transport and logistics: the payments for waggons, horses and drivers, which had amounted to more than £400,000. Senior officers had the responsibility of signing off disbursements, even though they may not have been privy to the payments made by their staff, so a particular issue was whether fraud had been committed without their knowledge. This opportunity for abuse arose because the more junior officers who were entrusted with expenditure had been allowed to have an interest in it – something that was often highly lucrative – and there appeared to

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be insufficient critical examination of the documentation. William was called to give evidence, under oath, in May 1782: his role was to describe the proper procedures, which he had carried out during the evacuation of the troops from Germany at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763.2 No public money had been ‘imprested or intrusted’ to him, either in his capacity as an Engineer or as an Assistant Quartermaster General, and accounts were paid, against receipts, by the Deputy Paymaster General who had been sent to Holland for that purpose. The propriety of this process was accepted by the Commissioners who also found that orders had been made by Lord Cornwallis in 1780 that had forbidden officers to have a pecuniary interest in the horses and waggons that they hired, and that these should be supplied at the direct cost. Had these orders been followed, along with the proper procedures that William had illustrated, excessive expenditure would have been avoided. Coming back to the present, the treaties signed at Paris and Versailles in September 1783 meant that Britain was at peace with its neighbours as well as with the United States. As in all of British history, the formal settling of relations with France was especially significant and its effects were direct and wide-ranging. The threat to the invasion coast of southern England was removed, and so there was less pressure upon William, as the Inspector of coasts and hinterlands, to stay one step ahead of developments in the defence of the nation. In this brief lull, from 1783 to 1793, in the long war with France, he could turn his attention to more constructive and collaborative activities, including science. Even so, there were obstacles to be overcome. Pre-Revolutionary France had a culture that was markedly different to that of Britain, and the two relevant national institutions, the Royal Society and the Académie Royales des Sciences, were unlike in size, composition and focus. The Académie was, from the first, a specialist expert organisation with a highly competitive system of selection, whereas the Royal Society had a very much wider, eclectic and catholic Fellowship, many of whom were patrons of science rather than practitioners. Nevertheless, despite the differences, there was much common ground.3 One of the topics that interested the members of both institutions was the shape of the Earth, for as cartographic systems became more extensive – most obviously in France – so an understanding of this subject became more important. The Newtonian view that the Earth was an oblate spheroid (flattened at the poles) had been contested in France, where a more elongated shape was favoured. The resolution4 of this demanded that widely separated arcs should be measured, stimulating the French expeditions to Peru and to Lapland in the 1730s and



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1740s. In 1767, Mason and Dixon had measured a short arc of meridian in Delaware, and it was this initiative, published in the Philosophical Transactions, that had provided a methodology for the approach adopted by their British successors, including William. Separately, it had become clear that refinements in the measurement of baselines within any triangulation were essential if cumulative errors were to be minimised. Real progress was made possible by the greatly improved technical accuracy of the instruments available and, in consequence, there was a shift in focus towards the management of the sources of error, especially in physical measurement. (It took longer for the mathematics of computation to catch up.) These field experiments had more than scientific importance: military men such as William appreciated that geodetic surveys could provide frameworks for better topographical mapping, the need for which was changing as the nature of warfare was itself shifting from the siege to the more mobile deployment of armies in open country. Britain, as an island, had a particular need to defend its invasion coast – a topic in which William had a particular interest – but the realisation was growing that this was no longer going to be achieved by constructing grand fortifications. These changes in military attitudes on land were developing in parallel to the better-known search for the determination of longitude, especially at sea, which was so important to the expansionist imperial ambitions of the European powers. Taken together, these shifts of focus formed the context for the suggestion that William had included within his proposal for a national survey in 1766 that a meridian of arc should be measured in Britain because his attention had moved away from the depiction of topographical detail to the construction of an accurate framework for cartography. He later recounted what had happened in the months preceding the signing of the treaties at Paris and Versailles and shortly thereafter: The peace of 1783 being concluded, and official business having detained me in or near town during the whole of that summer, I embraced the opportunity, for my own private amusement, to measure a base of 7743.3 feet, across the fields between the Jews-Harp, near Marybone [sic], and Black Lane, near [St] Pancras;5 as a foundation for a series of triangles, carried on at the same time, for determining the relative situations of the most remarkable steeples, and other places, in and about the capital, with regard to each other, and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The principal object I had here in view (besides that it might possibly serve as a hint to the public, for the revival of the now almost forgotten scheme [for a national cartographic survey] of 1763) was to facilitate the comparison of the observations, made by the lovers of astronomy, within the limits of the projected survey; namely,

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Richmond and Harrow, on the west; and Shooter’s-Hill and Wansted, on the east … I was engaged in making the computation for that purpose, when, very unexpectedly, I found that an operation of the same nature, but much more important in its object, was really in agitation. In the beginning of October, 1783, Comte d’Adhemar, the French Ambassador, transmitted to Mr Fox, then one of His Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State, a memoir of M. Cassini de Thury, in which he sets forth the great advantages that would accrue to astronomy, by carrying a series of triangles from the neighbourhood of London to Dover, there to be connected with those already executed in France, by which combined operations the relative situations of the two most famous observatories in Europe, Greenwich and Paris, would be more accurately ascertained than they are at present.6

That there might be discrepancies in the published positions of the two observatories was well known to Fellows of the Royal Society and had, for instance, been the subject of a paper in the Philosophical Transactions in 1777.7 So it is intriguing that this approach from César-François Cassini de Thury, the Director of the Royal Observatory in Paris, came forward at this particular point. The conventional explanation, which may well be wholly true, is that the peace provided the opportunity to revive a scheme that had been in the minds of the Cassinis for some time. And yet, for something so important, the mémoire was not a polished piece of work.8 It was very brief and it was remarkably tactless; although it flattered the wisdom of the King and the beauty of the city of London, it was based on a belief that all of the alleged shortcomings in observations and measurements lay at Greenwich and in England generally, and it moved rather too quickly to suggest that if no one in the Royal Society could take on the work then M. Cassini would be honoured to do it for them. Altogether it comes across as an opportunistic reaction rather than the exposition of a carefully considered project. If it was a reaction, what had prompted its delivery? The peace, certainly, but it is possible that there were additional contributory factors or a more immediate stimulus. In considering this it is clear that William’s rather casual reference to the base that he had measured between the Jews Harp and St Pancras belied the complexity of what he was doing. It is evident from one of his later papers that this work and the related observations that he had made from his rooftop in Argyll Street were extensive and were designed to form the basis of a new cartography for London.9 Further, this was not a solitary pursuit, casually carried out in the fields beyond the new road from Paddington to Islington. He would have needed several assistants,



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if only to cope with the stands that would have supported the chain or the rods that he was using for measurement, and such an unusual undertaking would have excited some notice, not only among the local people but also within his circle of friends in the Royal Society. The full list of his targets in 1783 – those ‘most remarkable steeples and other places’ that he sought to map – has not survived, but from what we know it is unlikely to have been substantially different from that which he was to choose four years later. It certainly included the properties of other Fellows of the Royal Society: Viscount Castlemaine at Wanstead House; Alexander Aubert in Highbury and at Loanpit Hill in Deptford; Hugh Cavendish on Clapham Common; and Joseph Banks at his country home of Spring Grove, at Smallbury Green, in Isleworth, about ten miles to the west. Crucially, the Royal Observatory at Greeenwich and the King’s Observatory at Richmond were also on the list.10 William’s project at Jews Harp was rather more than a simple, private hobby. In writing or revising his mémoire (which may have been initially drafted some considerable time earlier11), and in deciding to send it now, it is quite likely that Cassini de Thury had been told that a Fellow of the Royal Society was undertaking a new cartography of London, one that would include the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Cassini had long been keen to link the two observatories and to extend the French geodetic network, and news of such activity in London could well have provoked a reaction. There is no firm evidence for this, but – in what would otherwise be ‘an uncanny coincidence’12 – it remains very plausible, and two routes for its communication immediately present themselves. One is through a casual remark that might have been made by Charles Blagden when he visited Paris that summer, although, if so, it was not deliberate as he was not at all impressed by the elder Cassini.13 The second route, perhaps more likely, is that word may have come to the Académie through João Jacinto de Magalhães (known simply as Magellan), a Portuguese cleric, living in London, who had been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1774. He was known as ‘a purveyor of scientific gossip’ but he has been more directly described14 as ‘an unpaid confidential agent of the French government or, in other words, an industrial spy’ who sent a considerable amount of information to Paris on British developments in the technologies of the day. He was, moreover, well versed in the subjects that interested William, having published a book on octants and sextants in 1775 and one on hypsometry in 1779.15 He might therefore have been expected to be alert to any new venture led by General Roy. In the end, whether it was a product of coincidence or contrivance, the approach from Cassini de Thury proved

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to be convenient and timely for both parties, and not least for William: it transformed a solid, but limited, piece of local cartography into a significant and fully funded geodetic project. When the Secretary of State, Charles James Fox, received the mémoire he passed it to the President of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, to prepare a response. Fox may have assumed that Banks would consult Nevil Maskelyne, Cassini’s opposite number, but this did not happen, not least because the referral to Banks came while the latter was weathering a storm of opposition to his Presidency. Long-standing grudges and dissensions had come out into the open in 1782–3, expressed initially as arguments over the role and residence of the Foreign Secretary of the Society, Charles Hutton, and as disagreements about the publication of papers in advance of their appearance in the Philosophical Transactions. In December 1783, in an attempt to calm and resolve the matter, Charles Blagden suggested a vote of approbation of Banks as President, a move which William supported as long as it was couched in moderate terms. However, the opposition was bitter and was led by Samuel Horsley who evidently had his eye on the Presidency; he saw himself as representing the men of science and the mathematicians against the Banksian ‘Macaronis’, those ‘feeble amateurs’ who were engaged in the gentlemanly pursuit of natural history or of antiquarianism. This oversimplified the antagonism to Banks’s Presidency which sprang from various roots, including his alleged interference in the election of Fellows.16 Horsley was supported by Nevil Maskelyne, Charles Hutton, Paul Maty, Lieutenant James Glenie, Sir George Shuckburgh, and others. The rebellion was defeated, in a series of votes, but the rows simmered on into 1784 and the animosities had caused extensive bruising on all sides with their effects continuing for some time.17 It must have been an extremely uncomfortable time for William as he had friends in both camps and had been active in archaeology as well as in mathematics and experimental physics. Overall, however, his loyalty was to Banks. Leaving aside the gentle insurrection represented by his membership of the Royal Society Club, William was not a habitual rebel, and it was natural for him as an army officer to obey his commanding officer (in this case, Banks, as the President). So when Joseph Banks received Cassini’s mémoire he did not write to Maskelyne but to Charles Blagden, who was soon to become the Secretary of the Royal Society, with his reaction: I consider the operation as doing honor to our scientific character, & benefit to astronomy, & that I have no doubt but we have people enough in the



The Geodesist 209 R[oyal] S[ociety] able & willing to undertake it. If his Majesty will permit me to ask the advice of the Council of the RS, I shall be enabled, I hope, in a short time to give in a plan, estimate & names of proper people for his Majesty’s information. [In requesting some confidentiality, he added:] ‘… you may converse as much as you please of the absurd as well as [the] good parts of it. There are both.

Blagden was sceptical about the method proposed and particularly about making the link across the Channel, although he had decided that the scheme must be executed, without foreign assistance.18 A month later, Banks sent the mémoire to the person most willing and able to take on the project – William – asking him to carry out the task on behalf of the Society. ‘To this proposition I readily assented, on being soon afterwards assured, through the proper official channels, that my undertaking it met with his Majesty’s most gracious approbation.’ William provided an initial, but incomplete, estimate of the costs which included those for transport, the pay of six men for sixty days (at 2s 6d per day) and ‘Mathematical instruments of the best kinds, about £200.’ However, he soon realised,19 probably in discussions with Jesse Ramsden, that although a small instrument (‘a quadrant of a foot radius’) might have been adequate for his London cartography, the scheme to form a link with France would demand ‘a much longer base and angles determined by a large circular instrument’. Further, from the first, William clearly saw it all as a means to a rather different end than solely determining the difference in longitude between the two observatories: this, he considered, was of but small moment compared with other advantages that will in all probability arise from the commencement of these operations in Britain … extending different series of triangles in all directions to the remotest parts of the island; and even connecting them with others that may be carried over our Sister Kingdom. By these means the best foundation will be laid for an accurate survey of the British Dominions.20

With such ambition in mind, an instrument of a very much higher specification – a new theodolite with a horizontal circle 36 inches in diameter, capable of being read to one arc-second – was commissioned from Ramsden early in 1784, together with an achromatic telescope of 2.5 inches aperture. On 8 April the Treasury had sent word that the King had agreed to fund the project to the tune of £2,000. In his brief account of these steps (and no doubt in person at the time) William had the good sense to thank the King in a sincere public expression of his duty and willingness to serve.21

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Within the Royal Society, however, such cordiality and courtesy were still in short supply. It was about this time, ‘early in the year 1784’, that William spoke to Nevil Maskelyne about the mémoire, mentioning diplomatically that ‘whenever it came to be laid before the Public it must necessarily [draw] some remarks from you as Astronomer Royal’. He suggested that the best opportunity for Maskelyne to comment might be when the paper on the results of the measurement of the base was presented to the Royal Society. ‘To this proposition you made not then any objection.’22 Maskelyne, however, seems to have been still smarting from Banks’s defeat of the scientists and mathematicians and he decided to stand silently on his dignity: as was later revealed, he had not been shown the mémoire at that time and it seems that he was not going to demean himself by asking to see it. He would wait until the President should deign to show it to him. He did not tell William that this is what he had decided, nor did Banks admit that he was being thoroughly obstinate also, and that he would continue to be so for another full year. ON HOUNSLOW HEATH: AN EXERCISE IN EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICS

Whether or not he was ignorant of all this, William simply got on with the job in hand. His first task was to select a site for the long baseline that was required for a meticulous trigonometrical survey on such a scale; the choice of a site was, as it happened, not particularly difficult. With his ideas for a national survey constantly in mind, William had for years in the course of my ordinary military employments … not failed to observe, at least in a general way, such situations as seemed to be the best adapted for the measurement of the bases that will be necessary for the formation of the great triangles, and connecting the different serieses [sic] of them together.23

Thus, on 16 April William took Banks, Henry Cavendish and Charles Blagden about 14 miles (22 km) to the west of London for a reconnaissance of the site that was his first choice: Hounslow Heath. This was an unenclosed and unencumbered level plain of Taplow gravel, stretching from Fulwell in the east to Stanwell in the west, which, in the sixteenth century, had been estimated to cover more than 4,000 acres (1,700 hectares). There had been small encroachments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the Heath was still very extensive and had long been attractive to the military: musters and reviews of the troops had been held there since the reign of Charles I, and James II



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had e­ stablished a more permanent encampment.24 If carefully chosen, a baseline here could achieve a straight run of more than 5 miles (8.3 km). The other advantages of using the Heath as the site of a base were that the ground was dry and it was close to London; in addition, it was only 3 miles (5  km) from Joseph Banks’s country home at Spring Grove, in Isleworth.25 William evidently knew beforehand which general line across the Heath would be the most beneficial, for they started their inspection in the north-west, at King’s Arbour, at the northern end of a curving straggle of about twenty cottages – Heath Row – which faced out onto the plain (Figure 6.1). They then went south-eastwards, across the shallow folds occupied by the Old River and the River Coln, ending at the farthest extremity of the unenclosed land, beside the Poor House outside the village of Hampton. Their reconnaissance proved to be very satisfactory; the only task that would be required was to clear the line of the base of its gorse bushes and anthills. It was at this early stage, in all probability, that the influence and active support of the Master of the Ordnance, the Duke of Richmond, was particularly helpful, for it was judged to be a right measure to obtain and employ soldiers, instead of country labourers, in tracing the base, clearing the ground, and assisting in the subsequent operations. For at the same time this was obviously the most frugal method, it was evident that soldiers would be more attentive to orders than country labourers; and by encamping on the spot would furnish the necessary centinels, particularly during the night, for guarding such parts of the apparatus as it was foreseen must remain carefully untouched in the frequent interims of discontinuing and resuming the work. Accordingly, a party of the 12th regiment of foot, consisting of a sergeant, corporal, and 10 men, were ordered to march from Windsor to Hounslow Heath, where they encamped on the 26th of May, close by Hanworth Summer-house [about a quarter of the way west from Hampton], to which spot the necessary tents, camping equipment, and entrenching tools, etc. had been previously sent.26

In the serendipity that surveyors particularly enjoy, William spotted through his telescope that by tweaking the line slightly it could be sighted on the spire of All Saints Church in Banstead, twelve miles away across the Thames, in Surrey. This was important as a distant object would aid precision in achieving the perfectly straight line that would minimise inaccuracy in the distance measured. At first, however, the line was roughly set out, using flags, the spire and ‘a common telescope held in the hand only’. (This was because the stand for William’s own transit instrument – the one that would be used to range the line – was not yet ready.) The soldiers then cleared a swathe of ground, two to three yards wide, along the whole length of the base. William, in his old role as

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quartermaster, organised the logistics of their camps so as to minimise the travelling times, but it was a very wet summer and the preparations were not completed until the first week of July.27 This, however, did not hold up the start of the initial measurement which William was able to begin on 16 June at the south-east end. In order to provide the landscape context, a plan of the environs of the baseline (Figure 6.1) was already under way, led by a certain Thomas Vincent Reynolds, then aged about nineteen or twenty, who, three months later, would be commissioned as an Ensign in the 34th Regiment. The survey – a relatively simple task in this open, flat ­countryside – was an essential early component of the project28 which William managed in ways that were very similar to those that he had adopted in his investigations in hypsometry: it was carefully planned, methodical in execution, and pragmatic in devising and testing new methods whenever an initial system was found wanting. Above all, he was anxious to identify and minimise sources of error in the measurement, and to devise and apply appropriate corrections wherever they were needed. Later he would set down all of the achingly detailed process in a lengthy paper in the Philosophical Transactions – ninety-five pages of it – so that his method, and its strengths and weaknesses, was transparent and intelligible.29 (Here only the briefest outline will be given.) He had turned the measurement of the base into an exercise in experimental physics. After ‘a very tedious delay’, Jesse Ramsden delivered the high-­ specification steel chain that had been ordered for this initial measurement of the base.30 To get this started, a more precise line was established by tensioning a rope on an iron reel; along this, five men worked the chain which was temporarily fixed for measurements between steel ‘arrows’, and an oak picket was driven into the ground at the end of each section of six chain-lengths. In three and a half hours the team had measured seventy-eight chains (7,800 feet/2,377.4 m). As a matter of course, the mean temperature was noted, as it would be each day, so that a correction could be made for the expansion or contraction of the chain. The next section was then measured twice, as a check, the difference between the two results being only 1.5 inches in 7,800 feet. Meanwhile, the small ascents and descents along the line were gradually recorded with the spirit level: the whole fall, from north-west to south-east along the base, over five miles long, was found to be only 31.265 feet (9.53 m). Great care was taken to pinpoint the ends of the base, beginning in the south-east. A wheel from a coach was sunk into the ground and secured (Figure 6.2); a wooden pipe was then inserted through its nave and bolted in place to keep it vertical. A brass cup, marked with a central

Figure 6.1  The western end of the baseline on Hounslow Heath, close to the curving line of cottages called Heath Row, as depicted in the survey and watercolour by Thomas Reynolds. This area is now covered by the airport. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 269, pl. 1

Figure 6.2  The stands made to carry the deal rods in the measurement of the base on Hounslow Heath, and the wheel (bottom left) that marked each terminal. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 269, pl. 3



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point, was finally fixed into the top of the pipe. For the final phase of measurement William planned to use deal rods, made from an old mast of red ‘Riga wood’ that had been specially procured from the Admiralty yard at Deptford. The manufacture of these rods – ‘the best … that ever were made’ – had taken Jesse Ramsden almost six weeks but in mid-July they were at last delivered. They were designed to be read either by the coincidence of lines engraved upon them within ivory strips or by the contact of their bell-metal tips. Measurement could begin when the first rod was clamped into its exact position above the brass cup in the pipe. William knew that measuring along the surface of the ground would not be sufficiently accurate, so the base was divided into forty-six sections of thirty rod-lengths (200 yards) in order to measure ‘a line through the air, drawn parallel to the common surface from station to station’. Along this, stands were needed to support the measuring rods (Figure 6.2): a fixed stand at each end of the section and up to seventeen intermediate ones which were movable and supported on small, levelled platforms. Boning rods, the simple T-shaped staffs still used on construction sites, were employed to bring the bearing surfaces of the stands to the same level.31 To sight these, William had a small brass telescope, specially designed for short distances, which still survives, along with its wooden case.32 Flat as the Heath was, the total length of each of the forty-six sections was not a true horizontal distance but the hypotenuse of a long triangle that would have to be reduced to a plan value. Here he was dealing with very small numbers. From the extraordinary levelness of Hounslow-Heath, the ascent from the south east towards the north west being little more than one foot in a thousand in the distance of five miles, it was easily seen that the computed baseline, or that actually forming a curve parallel to the surface of the sea, at that height above it, would fall so little short of the hypothenusal distance, measured on or parallel to the surface of the Heath, as scarcely to deserve notice, had it not been thought necessary to show how much one end of the base was really higher than the other; and to convince the world that in an operation of this sort, where so much accuracy was expected, no pains were spared, nor the most trivial circumstances neglected.

This was an article of faith: William was not only demonstrating accuracy, he was also determining standards of practice. Heights and descents were measured, in feet, to two or three places of decimals and the reduction of the hypothenuses was calculated to six places. The final piece of essential specialist equipment was William’s brass standard scale, about 42 inches long in all, which he had bought at the

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sale of instruments that had been owned by James Short; it had been made by Jonathan Sisson and divided by John Bird in 1742. In 1783, when he was measuring the base at the Jews Harp, William had compared this scale with the standard held by the Royal Society, and they were found to agree exactly at 65° F. He now used it to calibrate the rods that were needed to measure the base on Hounslow Heath. (This scale was of sufficient quality that in 1819 the Select Committee inquiring into the Original Standards of weights and measures recommended that ‘Roy’s standard’ should be used for the yard, although it later changed its mind.33) Once again, William was being meticulous about transparency and accuracy. Meanwhile, on a less serious note, a hospitality tent had been set up by Joseph Banks so that guests visiting the project could be entertained without disrupting the operations, but the weather was so bad that although the King and Queen came to visit and spent some time on site, the process could not be demonstrated to them on the ground. (No doubt William took the opportunity, while they were waiting in the tent, to allude tactfully to the desirability of extending the base and the triangulation as the foundation of a national survey.) Indeed, the variable weather conditions were a source of concern throughout. The 100-feet chain, which was kept under a constant tension, was found to be 0.161 inch longer at 74° F on a summer’s day than the standard, and now the rain and the humidity were having an effect on the deal rods too. William was acutely conscious of the differential rates of expansion of the materials that he was using (steel, deal and, latterly, glass), so much so that he had ordered from Ramsden a bespoke microscopic pyrometer, a large and complex piece of equipment, the accuracy and complexity of which filled sixteen pages of description in the paper about the project. The pyrometer enabled William to measure the rates of expansion and contraction of the chain and rods ‘with an exactness before unknown, and which furnished the measure of a base with a precision ten times greater than in any of those ever before measured’.34 The controls placed upon every aspect of the work were proving effective: the full unreduced measurement of the base with the deal rods was found to be only 2.9 inches more than that when using the chain. Nevertheless, William Calderwood, who had been so active in the experiments on hypsometry on his native Pentlands, suggested that glass would be a more stable material than deal, good as it was, and he was asked to pursue this. The result was the arrival from Ramsden of several fine glass tubes, 18 feet long and 1 inch in diameter; each of them weighed about 61 pounds (27 kg) and was held in a wooden case to stop it bending.35 The whole



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process could now start again. On 21 August, ‘about noon, His Majesty deigned to honour the operation by his presence, for the space of two hours, entering very minutely into the mode of conducting it, which met with his gracious approbation’. Nine days later, after some additional work to cross the elevated camber of the Roman road from London to Silchester, the measurement with the glass rods was complete. This was a moment of celebration which was attended by the doctor and former Engineer, Charles Bisset,36 Sir William Hamilton and his nephew Charles Greville,37 John Lloyd, a stalwart of the Royal Society Club who had taken part in the experiments in hypsometry, and Dr Henry Ussher, the Professor of Astronomy in Trinity College Dublin, who was another customer of Jesse Ramsden.38 The work, of course, did not end there. At this stage William had his data from the field: the lengths of the forty-six sections of the base, as measured using the glass rods. From this total value of 27,402.8204 feet, the reduction of the forty-six hypotenuses had to be made: a total of 0.0714 feet. The apparent length was then adjusted to allow for the expansion and contraction of the rods on each day of the survey and reduced to a common value of 62° F, and then again to meet the temperature at which the rods had been laid off against the standard brass scale. A further correction was needed to bring the result (of the south-eastern end) to the level of the sea, first by taking it to the level of the Thames at Hampton and finally to that of low water spring tides at the river’s mouth. With these minuscule adjustments, the computed length of the base was found to be 27,404.7219 feet, and ‘by throwing away some useless decimals’, William arrived at the final figure of 27,404.7 feet. ‘It will doubtless be allowed [he wrote], that infinite pains have been taken in the field and otherwise, throughout the whole of this operation, to obtain a just conclusion.’39 During the work on the base there had been two significant developments. The first was that, in July, the Duke of Richmond had reorganised the Corps of Engineers in recognition of the changed demands since the Peace of Versailles. One of the ten Companies now formed was entitled Surveying and Ready for Field Service, and William had been appointed as its Commanding Engineer, a welcome recognition of his expertise and of his interest in standards and in training. One of his early tasks in this role was to draw up a set of ‘General Instructions for the officers of Engineers employed in surveying’. This covered the measurement of bases; the design of the principal triangles; the determination of heights (keeping an eye also on the identification of commanding positions); the design of logbooks; topographical depiction and the infilling of

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detail; the establishment of a meridian; the choice of scales; and the need to keep miscellaneous notes on tactical considerations and on local supplies and resources. Some of this harked back to the ‘Instructions on Reconnoitring’ that he had produced for David Watson in about 1750, but this new set of orders was to become ‘the technical charter of the first Trigonometrical Survey’ and a significant document within the foundations of the Ordnance Survey.40 Richmond had argued that a larger number of Engineers would be needed for the work that had to be done across Britain’s widening dominions but, at the same time, the King considered that the additional pay that had been allocated to them ‘… during the last war was greater than we judged reasonable to allow in times of peace’. All allowances of extra pay would cease from 30 September and would be replaced by a new system of allowances for the Engineers while they were surveying in the field. In an exceptional clause, the King’s warrant added it is not our intention that this regulation shall affect the allowance of 20s per day, which by our Warrant of 31st July 1765 we have made to our trusty and well beloved Lieutenant Colonel William Roy, one of our Engineers, for inspecting, surveying, and making reports from time to time of the state of the coasts and districts of the country adjacent to the coasts of this kingdom, and the islands there unto belonging.

That William should be the only officer mentioned by name in this Warrant is a mark of the regard in which he was now held by the King, aided, no doubt, by his friendship with Richmond.41 This mark of favour was underlined in November by his attendance at a ‘Drawing Room’ (a reception at the royal Court) in St James’s Palace.42 The second development was that Joseph Banks had written to Cassini de Thury, telling him that the King had approved the project to determine the relative positions of the observatories in London and Paris, and that William would be undertaking it on behalf of the Royal Society. However, as there was no instrument in England that was sufficiently accurate for such a task, one had had to be ordered; there was thus no hope that the triangulation would begin until the following summer (1785) and, in any case, the first phase would be the measurement of the base, the preparation for which had begun. In his reply, Cassini expressed his pleasure at the King’s approval of ‘mon projet’ and that William – ‘officier d’une grande reputation’ – had been put in charge. Keen to forge ahead, he urged that William should, that first summer (when William was busy working on Hounslow Heath), send some Engineers to identify which points in England and France were



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intervisible, as this would determine where a base might be measured somewhere along the adjacent coastline. Pressing home his confidence about the superiority of triangulation, he enclosed with his letter a copy of La Description Géométrique de la France, his account of the national cartographic survey that he had begun in 1740. Implicitly, the logic of the extension of the network to England simply underlined for him the strength of the French trigonometry which was, he argued, fully able to compete with the methods based on astronomical observations.43 However, three months later, aged seventy, Cassini de Thury succumbed to smallpox; his role in the Paris observatory would fall to his son, Jean-Dominique, the fourth astronomer of the dynasty, who was to be equally enthusiastic about pushing forward the AngloFrench project. Meanwhile, Jesse Ramsden was slowly working on his commission for a new high-specification theodolite; until that was delivered, all of the other players in England and in France would have to wait. In this hiatus, William prepared his paper about the measurement of the baseline for the Philosophical Transactions, a task which will have absorbed his spare time over many months; not only was the text – and especially the tables of figures – long and complex, but there were the illustrations to produce also. The survey of the area, produced by Ensign Thomas Reynolds, was straightforward enough (there was no relief to speak of) but it was diligently done, with good lettering and competent detail (Figure 6.1). It achieved what it was designed to do. The other four long folding plates – which exhaustively depict the chain, the deal rods (Figure 6.2), the glass rods and the microscopic pyrometer, and illustrate their use – are ‘among the finest and most detailed precision drawings published in the eighteenth century’. They played a crucial role, not only in documenting exactly what had been done, so that its quality could be assessed by others, but also in setting some of the standards for a national survey. Even though Ramsden’s steel chain would not normally call for lengthy comment, let alone an illustration, William’s aim was ‘to elevate mundane measurement, through obsessive care over every detail’.44 The plates were the work of James Basire, the second in the dynasty of fine engravers,45 who had the monopoly to supply completed illustrations for both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. Basire’s engravings for William’s paper in the Philosophical Transactions are of the highest quality, scaled technical drawings that are so assiduously inclusive of every nut, bolt and joint that they amount to blueprints from which the objects depicted could be reconstructed to a full operational state.

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FORTIFICATIONS, FEUDS AND FIRST STEPS IN KENT

Alongside his geodetic project, William had other continuing responsibilities. When the Duke of Richmond had become Master of the Ordnance in 1782, a year before the Peace of Versailles was signed, he had set himself the task of strengthening the defences of the strategically important naval bases and dockyards at Portsmouth and Plymouth. This was probably due, in no small part, to recommendations for the fortification of the bases that William had made in his capacity as the Inspector of coasts and hinterlands after a tour in 1770, and which he had revised in 1779.46 To this end, in June 1782 Richmond took William, General William Haviland (the Commander of the Western District) and General Charles Grey to Plymouth where they inspected the citadel and storehouses, the high ground at the back of the town, and the most recent defences.47 The conversation on this site-visit will certainly have turned to the need for appropriate large-scale mapping for the proper planning of new fortifications, and early in 1783 Richmond gave instructions to William Gardner to survey the environs of the docks at Plymouth ‘against a regular siege’. The 6-inch manuscript map that Gardner produced lies at the transition between county mapping and national cartography: it became, in effect, a prototype for the future work by the draughtsmen of the Board of Ordnance and is thus another of the founding documents of the Ordnance Survey.48 Richmond estimated that the cost of refortification of the two ports would be something over £400,000, and the money was duly allocated, to be paid in annual instalments of £50,000. But there was strident opposition. The estimates were attacked by the disputatious Engineer, James Glenie, who put the costs at more than five times those arrived at by Richmond; further, and in keeping with the emerging strategies of the day, he argued not for the building of static fortifications but for investment in the navy as protection for infrastructure ashore. Richmond’s plans were running into trouble: the second round of payments was questioned in Parliament, with the result that in April 1785 an inquiry was set up. This had, within its remit, the seeds of a bitter dispute: a specially selected Board of Land and Sea Officers (from the army and the navy) was asked to consider ‘the proper system of defence for Portsmouth and Plymouth … [and whether this should be] a system of naval defence alone, a system of land defence, from troops alone, or a system of naval and land defence combined’. But first ‘it will be necessary for them to agree on the nature and extent of the attack against which it is to be calculated’. There were several opportunities for



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dissension here. Two committees, drawn from eleven naval officers and twenty-one Generals, were appointed, one for each base, with overlapping memberships; William was a member of both. He was also one of the smaller team of Engineers which was then charged with coming up with a revised estimate of costs for the measures that were finally recommended. The Board’s report (heavily redacted for public consumption) was laid before the House of Commons in February 1786, along with a new price of £760,097, but the conclusions arrived at were not unanimous. When Pitt moved a motion in support of the recommendations, during an all-night sitting, a lengthy and acrimonious debate ensued in which Richmond was repeatedly criticised. In the final division, the votes were tied, and the Speaker decided against the motion. In truth, the static defences that Richmond had championed were out of date in a world in which armies were becoming more mobile.49 He was badly bruised and although he did not give up the fight immediately, he had to be content with authorising only minor improvements at Portsmouth and Plymouth.50 Difficult though it undoubtedly was, the whole affair seems to have cemented further the relationship between William and Richmond. The strategy for the defence of the naval bases was not the only topic that was contentious. On 21 April 1785, in the same month that the Board of Land and Sea Officers was set up, William began to present to the Royal Society his paper on the measurement of the base on Hounslow Heath. It had been his intention that Nevil Maskelyne’s comments on the mémoire, and the French text itself, should be included as an appendix to this paper, and the Astronomer Royal had been repeatedly reminded of this. But no comments were forthcoming. The dissensions within the Royal Society that had so polarised much of its active membership during 1782–3 were still having their effect, and Maskelyne had been one of those who had actively opposed Banks’s conduct as President.51 William was puzzled and probably nettled by Maskelyne’s silence but, nevertheless, he had resolved to accommodate myself to your [Maskelyne’s] convenience, and to show you at the same time every mark of politeness and attention, otherwise I should have subjoined M. Cassini’s memoir to my account of the operations at Hounslow Heath, and left it to you to receive a comment or not, as you might think fit.52

Exactly a week after William’s paper was read, as Nevil Maskelyne was careful to note in print,53 Joseph Banks finally sent the Astronomer Royal a copy of the mémoire that he had received from Cassini de Thury

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eighteen months earlier. Perhaps Banks had been shamed into sending it. As William read his paper, Fellows cannot have failed to notice that it was a strange turn of events when a major project, funded by the King and focused on the determination of longitude, was proceeding without the collaboration of the Astronomer Royal. Even though William was back on the Council of the Royal Society, and thus a member of the Board of Visitors of the Observatory,54 there seems to have been no collaboration in these initial stages of the GreenwichParis project. However, that did not mean that Maskelyne was inactive. In his mémoire, Cassini de Thury had suggested that the uncertainties about the relative positions of the two observatories amounted to 15 arc-seconds in latitude and 11 seconds of time in longitude. Maskelyne, however, was sure that his own work and the observations carried out by his predecessor, James Bradley (to which Cassini had had no access), showed that the discrepancy in latitude was actually 4''.5. For the difference in longitude he took a very different tack: in late September 1785 he put his assistant, Joseph Lindley, on the coach to Paris with four chronometers and four watches, all made by John Arnold, the outstanding and most original watchmaker of his day.55 These were compared with the clocks in the two observatories, in turn, producing a weighted mean of 9 m 19 s.8 for the difference in longitude.56 It is extraordinary that this expedition was kept secret, but perhaps Maskelyne was wary of publicising this experiment as the role of chronometers as dependable instruments was not yet routinely established.57 In his paper on the mémoire, which he eventually published in 1787, Maskelyne made no mention of Lindley’s trip, nor of the results obtained, confining himself to saying simply58 that ‘we may take the difference of meridians [that is, longitude] 9' 20'', as being within a very few seconds of the truth’. As indeed it is. The Astronomer Royal was now at ease and confident that he knew the answer to the question of longitude. He could let William’s geodetic exercise run its course; if it proved to be in error he had sufficient evidence to correct it. It was perhaps of greater importance for his position, more generally, that he repaired his relationship with Banks, which he evidently did: he was back on the Council of the Royal Society at the meeting in November 1785. At that same meeting, William was awarded the Society’s Copley Medal, its highest award, for his work on Hounslow Heath; in his address, the President praised him for his ‘assiduity, activity, and skill’, and as the ‘one person … we possess in this island … willing to undertake and able to execute the most difficult operations of mensuration’.59 Altogether it had been a good autumn for William; it had also included his promotion to be a Colonel in the Corps of Engineers.60



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Away from London, out in the countryside, there were the first indications of the more extensive programmes of cartographic survey that the baseline and the triangulation would make possible. In July 1785, at the end of the General Instructions for the Officers of Engineers employed in surveying that William had drafted for Richmond, was the order that ‘the first part of the survey may be of the country between the River Thames and Medway’ specifically the area to the north of Maidstone, and the approaches to Chatham, including the Isles of Sheppey and Grain. Weekly progress reports were to be made to Richmond and to William.61 Teams were soon on the ground to supply this militarily sensitive product, as the The Public Advertiser reported: A party of engineers and artillery, during the greatest part of last summer, have been employed, under the direction of General Roy, in surveying the county of Kent; it being the intention of Government to have a survey of the whole counties in England, on a much more accurate and extensive plan than has hitherto been done. It is not however intended to publish them, because they are to contain surveys of the coast, with the landing places, and the depth of water, etc made from actual experiment.62

The maps that were made in Kent that year have not survived, but William now had a department within the Engineers that was dedicated to survey and the initial target areas were his speciality – the coasts and hinterlands. However, these and the other earliest topographical surveys carried out under the auspices of the Board of Ordnance were not directly related to the wider, national scheme of triangulation that William now envisaged, but to smaller programmes, all at 6-inch scale. From the Instructions issued in 1785, the priorities identified seem to have been intended to take in discrete areas of potential military importance, unconnected by any grander framework: Jersey was surveyed in 1787 (when Richmond created the post of Chief Surveying Draughtsman in the Tower of London); Guernsey in 1788; and then back to North Kent and the Medway in 1789.63 It was a start, but a cartographic survey on a national scale could only be based on the sort of national framework that the meticulous work on Hounslow Heath could support. And for that they would all have to wait until Jesse Ramsden could deliver the new theodolite that had been ordered from him. Had Ramsden been able to deliver an instrument immediately, William himself would not have been ready. In the winter of 1785–6, using his detailed knowledge of the region, he designed a series of equilateral triangles, with sides of twelve to eighteen miles, from the base on Hounslow Heath to the south-western coast of Kent, a network

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that could be extended across the Channel to survey stations already established within the French cartographic system between Calais and Boulogne. In England, William’s triangles (Figure 6.3)64 stretched southeastwards from Hounslow to Sevenoaks and Tenterden, using the heights of the North Downs and those of the Weald, reaching the shores of the Channel on Romney Marsh where a baseline of verification (a check on accuracy) would be measured. The hope was that work could begin in that summer of 1786 and, to that end, Lieutenant James Fiddes, one of the officers in William’s survey department, was detailed to begin the mapping of the Marsh so that the line of this second base could be determined. By September, however, the new theodolite had still not arrived, and William had given up hope of any other fieldwork that season. ‘It is hard upon me to have this operation hanging over my head for another year, without any fault of mine; but with such a man as Ramsden there is no help for it.’ Despite this, he had continued his preparations by testing and retesting the lights that would be used as targets for the observation of the angles across the Channel, using Nettlebed windmill, a high point on the south-eastern face of the Chilterns, and Shooter’s Hill Tower, about forty-seven miles apart. Diplomatically, he was also making arrangements with James Lind, in Windsor, to allow the King to see what was going on through telescopes on these distant targets.65 Although at the same time there were more everyday distractions – such as William’s provision of revised recommendations for the defence of Gibraltar, and a public examination of the cadets at the Royal Military Academy66 – this waiting time had certainly provided opportunities for him to worry through each part of the process that would be needed to connect the two kingdoms. In addition, to make it all more complicated, there were other interested parties. Late in 1786, Thomas Hornsby, the Savilian Professor and the astronomer at the fine and well-equipped Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford, had lobbied the King for the triangulation of the GreenwichParis project to be extended to the Duke of Marlborough’s observatory at Blenheim, and he had suggested an additional test, using rockets, to confirm the accuracy of William’s work and that of the French team also. Early in February 1787, William wrote a reply, kicking back against solely astronomical methods and arguing that there would be no time that year to take the triangles farther west to Oxford (much though he might have wished to do so in support of his national survey). Clearly stressed by this added pressure, he also feared that the ‘uncertain state of his health might prevent his finishing what he hoped to begin’.67

Figure 6.3  The ink and watercolour map by Thomas Reynolds of the triangulation set out between Hounslow Heath and the French coast to establish the relative locations of the observatories of Greenwich and Paris. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 272, pl. ix

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The Greenwich-Paris project had a high profile, and it will undoubtedly have been mentioned on 16 March when William and the Secretary at War had an audience with the King. The delay occasioned by Ramsden’s slow progress therefore continued to be an embarrassment at every level. Ten days later William set out on a journey from London to Gloucester; whatever the reason for going, the time was used, with his usual single-mindedness, to the benefit of the project: recording relevant heights. William made notes68 along the way, stopping at significant topographical points to log the barometric pressure and the temperature so that he could calculate the differences in elevation. At 2.00 pm on the first day he stopped at the east end of Henley bridge across the Thames; at 3.30 pm he was at the windmill in Nettlebed, where the flares had been tested, and whence Windsor and most of London would have been visible. At 5.00 pm he had reached Benson, in Oxfordshire. Two days later he was up in time to take readings in the parlour of The King’s Head in Cirencester at 6.00 am, and he then stopped at Birdlip Hill at 9.40 am before taking more readings at the blacksmith’s shop at the bottom of the hill; he reached the parlour of The Swan at Gloucester by 10.50 that morning where the final set was logged. Even while he was waiting for Ramsden he was driving himself on, both for the immediate project and in planning the advance of the triangulation westwards for the national survey. WHILE WAITING FOR RAMSDEN: A NEW FAMILY

In the personal side of his life, William had very different concerns. His surviving sister, Susan, had died five years beforehand, leaving him with no blood ties closer than a few distant cousins, still in Clydesdale. He was, however, about to acquire a new family. In September 1785, the second Baron Ducie of Tortworth had died of a fever at his home, Woodchester Park, in Gloucestershire. William had probably never met him, although his name would have been familiar. The Baron had been born Thomas Reynolds, taking the additional surname of Moreton when he succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of his uncle in 1770. At that time he had also resigned his commission in the Coldstream Guards.69 Thomas Reynolds Moreton was the natural father of Thomas Vincent Reynolds, the young Ensign of the 34th Regiment who (initially as a civilian) had been in charge of the survey of the landscape on Hounslow Heath in 1784. Born in about 1764, the boy was given his father’s name, so it is likely that paternity was acknowledged and that some provision was made for his mother, Mary



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Hayes.70 Almost nothing is known for certain about her, but she seems to have been a widow with a young daughter, Catherine, when Thomas was conceived. There is no record of how William became acquainted with this family; proximity probably played a part, as in the mid1780s Mary was living in Poland Street, only about 400 m away from William’s house in Argyll Street.71 The depth of any relationship between William and Mary is quite unknown. Given his customary mode of life – a good deal of travelling and an obsessive streak, to the exclusion of all else, during his scientific experiments – it seems unlikely that he was looking for a wife, or even for domestic change, when he was almost sixty. William and Mary probably met in London, and William recognised that Thomas was a very competent draughtsman; he evidently employed him, before his commission in the army, to work on the survey of Hounslow Heath quite soon after the reconnaissance for the baseline on 16 April 1784. (How the young man had been trained and had gained experience as a surveyor is unknown.) Thomas’s commission as an Ensign in the 34th Regiment, which was not gazetted until August 1784,72 may have been facilitated by his father but the young man would always have known that he could not inherit his father’s title, and any interest in the Gloucestershire estates was extremely unlikely to materialise. Nevertheless, he might reasonably have expected some financial provision to continue, if not for him, then for his mother. Baron Ducie’s sudden death was a disaster for them because he died intestate,73 and the administration of his estate would have precluded any discretionary provision for Mary and her son. The change in her circumstances is succinctly illustrated by two fire insurance policies: the first she had taken out in January 1785 on 56 Poland Street, for which cover of £300 was provided; sometime in the following year, after the Baron’s death, she had moved to 78 Long Acre, a less salubrious property for which cover was fixed at only £100.74 At the same time, in marked contrast, William would have been feeling comfortably off as, in November 1786, he was made Colonel of the 30th Regiment of Foot,75 an appointment that was usually a lucrative sinecure. Mary’s move downmarket to Long Acre suggests that the relationship was little more than personal philanthropy; the catastrophic loss of prospects suffered by Thomas – a promising young officer with whom William could identify – and by his mother, seems to have prompted a response. This, then, was the context in which William made a new Will, which was signed on 13 December 1786.76 The witnesses were his friends Robert Bisset and Sir William Erskine, and another Scot, Major

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William Farquhar of the 20th Foot. In an earlier Will, Susan, William’s ‘much beloved sister’, appears to have been his residual legatee; this now passed to Thomas Reynolds who by this time was with his regiment in Canada. William’s oldest friend, David Dundas, then the Quartermaster General of Ireland, was named as an executor, along with James Livingstone,77 a Scot whom William had got to know in London. The estate was not insignificant, including the freehold of his house and £8,000 in consolidated annuities (consols). Of the latter, half of the annual interest was to be paid as an annuity to Mary Hayes, and £500 of the consols themselves was to go direct to Mary’s daughter, Catherine Hayes,78 ‘now at Whitehaven in Cumberland, because she is a virtuous and industrious young woman’. Reversions and contingencies, if Thomas died before he could inherit, included provision for ‘James Roy, the son of my cousin John, of Lanark’, and for ‘Lieutenant William Purdie of the 39th Regiment of Foot, my godson who is also my half cousin’ (both of whom had small legacies), and for the poor in the parish of Carluke. It may have been about this time, and possibly in connection with this new-found family, that William had his portrait painted. No mention of a portrait was made in William’s lifetime and there are no means of knowing by whom it was commissioned, from whom, or why, but its existence was flagged in a letter written in 1954 by Lieutenant Colonel Clifton Vincent Reynolds Wright (a great-grandson of Thomas Reynolds) to Major General John Willis, the Director General of the Ordnance Survey. Wright wrote that a miniature of William (which he claimed, incorrectly, to have been painted by Maria Cosway) had been stolen from his London flat in 1929 along with other artefacts, none of which was recovered. A portrait miniature that may be the same one – there is no way to be certain, one way or the other – surfaced in 2019 (Figure 6.4). It is labelled with William’s name and dates, written on a piece of Victorian printed card that was used as packing behind the ivory slip on which the paint was applied. Measuring 95 mm by 76 mm, the picture79 is of a man in uniform, aged about sixty, of slight build, with greying sideburns and a receding hairline, framed by unruly  curls that must once have been very dark. He has full lips and hazel eyes, and he seems to be at peace with himself. A letter from the Chief Engineer in 1782 described the uniform that had been prescribed for the Engineers: ‘His Majesty directs the uniform in future to be worn by the Corps of Engineers to be a blue coat, faced with black velvet lined with white, with a white waistcoat and breeches.’ (This combination, unfortunately, was very close to

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Figure 6.4 Is this the face of William Roy? It is labelled as such, although some uncertainties remain. Author’s collection

the uniform of French army officers, a similarity that sometimes had fatal consequences.80) The man in the portrait wears a very dark blue or black coat with full bullion fringes, a white shirt, a black stock, and a black cravat, its folds held in place with a gold pin. His white waistcoat is crossed by an ornamental watch-string. The uniform may be that of an Engineer (perhaps in undress form), but  it is also possible that it is that of a naval officer of c. 1795 to 1812; it is difficult to be sure. The hairstyle and the sideburns might also place it in the early years of the nineteenth century.  However,  the  tantalising label within the backing remains, and this likeness should be compared with the watercolour  (Figure 2.6)  of  a young man sketching in the Highlands in the late 1740s; this has been attributed to Paul Sandby and may well be a portrait of William, almost forty years younger and fuller-faced, but with the same unruly dark hair. He is wearing a red military coat to which William, as a civilian, may not have been strictly entitled.81

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LINKING BRITAIN AND FRANCE

By early December 1786, William had been waiting the best part of three years for Ramsden to deliver the new theodolite, but some months beforehand an accident in the workshop had meant that the division of the instrument had had to start all over again.82 He was also waiting for Nevil Maskelyne to comment on the mémoire, which William assumed (wrongly) that the Astronomer Royal had received more than two years earlier. To make matters worse, the King had also been taking an interest83 but still there was no progress to report, which was acutely embarrassing. Moreover, it was now midwinter, and his old malady had no doubt returned, as it did every year, making him anxious, irritable and intolerant. He was evidently fearful that he would die or be incapacitated before his cherished project could be realised. On 11 December William wrote to Maskelyne, reminding him that he (William) had said in print that the mémoire would be published in his next paper. That paper, on the methods that were proposed for determining the relative positions of the observatories in Paris and London, was now imminent so William asked Maskelyne directly whether he was intending to lay the mémoire ‘with or without remarks’ before the Royal Society. At the end of the letter William gave way to his frustration, threatening that if Maskelyne did not respond he would produce the evidence that it was the Astronomer Royal, and not himself, who had caused the delay. Inevitably, perhaps, this rather ill-tempered demand resulted in some backwash. Both men presented their papers to the Society on 22 February, and Maskelyne got his reply in first. He reproduced the mémoire in full and explained how Cassini had been in error over the difference in latitude between the two observatories as he had not seen Bradley’s observations. For the longitude, he reviewed the astronomical evidence concluding – as he tacitly knew also from the chronometer run to Paris – that the mean difference between the two observatories will be found to be in the region of 9 m 20 s. In something of a put-down he accepted that The extensive geometric operations recommended by the late M. Cassini de Thury, and commenced under the direction of Major General Roy FRS by his exact measure of a base on Hounslow-Heath, may also, when completed, determine the difference of meridians [longitude] of Greenwich and Paris to great exactness. But they do not seem to me likely to throw any new light on the difference of latitude of the two observatories, because the uncertainty we are still under about the true figure and dimensions of the earth, and the irregular attractions arising from the irregular external figure and unequal



The Geodesist 231 density of the internal parts of the earth would prevent us from drawing any accurate conclusions.84

In his paper,85 William set out his stall immediately. Two years have nearly elapsed since an account of the measurement of a base on Hounslow-Heath was laid before the Royal Society, being the first part of an operation ordered by His Majesty to be executed for the immediate purpose of ascertaining the relative situations of the Royal Observatories of Greenwich and Paris; but whose chief and ultimate object has always been considered of a still more important nature, namely, the laying the foundation of a general survey of the British islands. [He then laid into Ramsden:] … the contrivance and construction of an instrument, new of its kind … and more particularly the nicety of its division, whereby it is hoped the angles may be determined to a degree of precision hitherto unexampled, have required much more time than Mr Ramsden himself at first imagined. Without meaning to disappoint, this ingenious artist was perhaps in the outset too remiss and dilatory, and accidents having happened when the workmanship was already far advanced … the execution has thereby been greatly retarded.

Although it may be surprising that he said these provocative things in public, it is the more so that they were retained within the printed version of the of the paper. There is some arrogance and anger here: his illness and anxiety were coming out as aggression, and he risked antagonising those on whom his own success depended. The two of them, William and Jesse Ramsden, were both pursuing accuracy – a prime Enlightenment goal86 – in their individual ways, and these different approaches were not always compatible or comfortable. However, most of the paper was occupied with worrying about the uncertainties within the data published by Cassini de Thury and about the questions that Nevil Maskelyne had flagged about the shape of the Earth; in this, William took into account as much international information as he had access to. Not for the first time, the reflections and computations in William’s paper went well beyond what was necessary for the immediate purposes of the survey. In his need to set out his thinking, he presented a detailed table comparing the results from the French arc of the meridian with ten theoretical models of the form of the Earth: a sphere, seven ellipsoids and two other spheroids. He followed this up with a large table of the lengths of the degrees of the meridian and of great circles for Bouguer’s hypothesis of a spheroid, which he favoured, although in his efforts to reconcile observations and theory there seem to have been some choices made that were not fully explained.87 Nevertheless, he had made a necessary point: the data could be considered against various

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premises in relation to the shape of the Earth – on this, Nevil Maskelyne would have agreed – and that it was the duty of science to continue to postulate until consensus was reached. Between William and Maskelyne there was still a fundamental disagreement about which approach would produce the best results. ‘The trigonometrical operation … may be considered infallible [William wrote], because, by means of the base of verification, it will prove itself’, and its results will be ‘probably considerably nearer [the truth] than it will be brought for many years to come by means of the best observations of the heavenly bodies’. He also foresaw other opportunities for his approach. Given the extent of the British Isles, from Suffolk to County Kerry and from the Channel coast to Orkney, he proposed that series of triangles should be constructed over the full distance from east to west, and that this national framework and coverage would, additionally, be wide enough to contribute useful data to the knowledge of the shape of the Earth.88 Warming to his subject, and looking farther afield, he thought that Portugal should measure degrees of longitude and latitude at the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil and that similar work in Russia could confirm or modify the results of the much earlier expedition to Lapland. Within the British sphere of influence, he followed Alexander Dalrymple in recommending that degrees of longitude could be measured on the coast of Coromandel, around Chennai on the Bay of Bengal, and that work to record a degree or two of latitude and longitude on the plains there would also reap dividends. The East India Company, he suggested, should fund these projects because of the benefits that it would derive through much greater accuracy in global navigation. It is clear from the contents of his library that his attention was increasingly drawn to the wider world89 beyond the British Isles, and this comparatively early example of imperial thinking was to have some consequences (although not those originally intended). An additional stimulus to William’s very public support for Dalrymple’s suggestion was probably his friendship with James Rennell who had been appointed as Surveyor General of Bengal in 1767. Rennell had returned to London ten years later, publishing his Bengal Atlas in 1780, and another edition in 1781 when he was also elected to the Royal Society. He joined the Royal Society Club in 1788, having been a frequent visitor, and it was probably during these initial dinners, when Rennell was a guest, that the two men got to know each other. William’s recommendations on the need for geodetic work in Bengal went to the directors of the East India Company who carefully assessed the costs and then decided to go ahead, ordering another large



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theodolite from Ramsden. This one was finally delivered in 1791 but, as will be explained in the following chapter, it never reached India.90 Despite Ramsden’s poor health in the late stages of preparing the theodolite for the Greenwich-Paris project, the instrument was eventually finished and delivered in July 1787.91 This huge piece of equipment,92 more than 3 feet in diameter and standing 4 feet high, had a divided h ­ orizontal circle (illuminated at night) which could be read to a second of arc over a distance of seventy miles (Figure 6.5); in the nineteenth century, when it was used in measurements between Scotland and Ireland, even greater distances were logged. It was phenomenally accurate, but it was extremely unwieldy93 and required a large amount of ancillary equipment. Apart from the ‘portable’ scaffold that maximised the height (and thus the horizon) of the theodolite for the observer, there were tripods, a tripod ladder and a flagstaff to carry the various flares and lights, and a crane to haul the theodolite into position on the scaffold. Banks had provided a four-wheeled sprung carriage on which was built ‘a kind of caravan, covered with painted oilcloth, whereby everything within was kept dry and secure’. It was fortunate that the Duke of Richmond had also provided an officer and a detachment from the Artillery to assist; the methodology that William had adopted for the measurement of the base was probably feasible only in a military context. The delivery from Ramsden in July meant that the field season was already far advanced, and William must have been worried that yet another year would be lost. He moved immediately, testing the theodolite in Hyde Park94 before, on 31 July, taking it out to the eastern terminal of the base on Hounslow Heath for the first observations in the new network of great triangles (Figure 6.3). On 14 August a start was made on building a scaffold over the Transit Room at Greenwich where the observations, made at the end of the month, included the firing of ‘white lights’; these were flares (Bengal lights), supplied by Woolwich Arsenal and fuelled mostly by nitre with small admixtures of sulphur and trisulphate of arsenic, which were to be especially important for the longer sightings across the Channel.95 William and the Astronomer Royal were collaborating once again; he and his team (including Charles Blagden) dined with Maskelyne, and William also stayed over for at least a couple of nights before the whole entourage moved on to Shooter’s Hill. Progress was rapid, except that on St Ann’s Hill, near Chertsey, the box containing the axis level for the theodolite was blown off the scaffold in a high wind.96 William thought that the replacement that Ramsden provided was decidedly inferior and this became a bone of contention.

Figure 6.5 Jesse Ramsden’s great theodolite, drawn by Thomas Reynolds. © The British Library Board, King’s MS 272, pl. iv



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Nevertheless, the team ploughed on as far as Wrotham Hill, on the North Downs near Sevenoaks, but here they had to break off in order to get to Dover to meet their counterparts from the Académie Royale des Sciences: Jean-Dominique Cassini, the astronomer Pierre-FrancoisAndré Méchain, and the mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre. Over two days in late September, ‘in the most amicable manner possible’, they agreed the times of the reciprocal observations across the Channel, and the white lights and reverberatory (reflecting) lamps were shared out between them. Everyone evidently got on extremely well, aided by William’s enthusiasm and fluency, by English tea and by an excellent and prolonged dinner. Cassini wrote97 that ‘Le général Roi est le plus digne homme et le plus respectable militaire que l’on puisse voir, plein d’aménitié, de bonhomie, de loyauté, de modestie. En peu de moments nous le prîmes tous dans la plus grande amitié.’ With the practical arrangements now settled, the two teams left Dover; Charles Blagden’s impeccable French made him the natural candidate to return to France as the principal point of liaison between them. Autumnal weather, including mist and fog, meant that it took nearly three weeks for all of the reciprocal sightings to be made across the Channel, but the system that had been devised worked well.98 Both teams then had work to do in the hinterland of their coast; in England, William tried to resume his triangulation but continuing bad weather made it dangerous to lift the bulky theodolite to the top of church towers and so, after a fortnight, the last two stations, including those at Goudhurst and Frant, had to be left for the following season.99 Meanwhile, in the first week of October, Jesse Ramsden had finally delivered his new steel chain for the measurement of the base on Romney Marsh. This important project was delegated to two extremely competent Scots: Lieutenant James Fiddes, one of William’s Engineers, and Lieutenant Alexander Bryce100 (seconded from the Artillery) who was the son of the Alexander Bryce, the student of Colin MacLaurin, who had mapped the coasts of Sutherland and Caithness in the 1740s. Fiddes and Bryce had problems with Ramsden’s chain but battled through atrocious weather to complete the base by early December, taking the line across ‘numberless ditches’ between Dymchurch and Ruckinge. After corrections for temperature and altitude, the result was found to be 28,532.92 feet (8696.83 m). It was just as well that the task was left to younger men; at that time of year, and in those conditions, it would probably have killed William. In the warmer weather of the following August, once the theodolite had been modified and repaired, the work on the triangles would be swiftly concluded and William would then be able to use the

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instrument to finalise the framework of the new cartography of London that he envisaged.101 Only then would his fieldwork finally be over. William’s star had risen to its zenith, socially and professionally. The army, his evident loyalty, and the potential offered by his scientific pursuits, had given him access even to the royal Court where he attended a number of levées; the King obviously thought highly of him.102 In the intellectual world his status was recognised by his election, in January 1788, as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers103 there were three founder members: John Playfair, Andrew Dalzel and James Hutton, respectively the Professors of Mathematics and of Greek in the University of Edinburgh, and ‘the father of modern geology’. This endorsement probably gave William some satisfaction and it will have consolidated his confidence about his own major project. In December, Cassini, Méchain and Legendre had been back in England. Despite the success and ease of use of Borda’s repeating circle, the lighter instrument that the French favoured, Cassini had instructions to inspect the products of the cream of British instrument-makers, including Ramsden and Dolland, and to visit the best equipped observatories, taking in Greenwich and Blenheim, and including a visit to William Herschel’s telescopes.104 British technology was held in high regard within the European Enlightenment, and Cassini, in particular, was committed to getting the very best equipment for the Paris Observatory. In addition, the fieldwork that William had designed and undertaken for the Greenwich-Paris project had evidently left a positive impression with his French counterparts. Their account of the project was ready by 1789 but courtesy, they decided, dictated that its publication should coincide with that of their British partners.105 This would take another year. Despite William’s ill health, the arduous task of writing up the English results of the triangulation now had to be tackled, but only a certain amount could be done before the repairs and adjustments to the theodolite were complete and the final short phase of ­triangulation  – abandoned in November – could be undertaken. On 9 August 1788 the instrument was set up on the church tower at Goudhurst and then at Frant, Botley Hill (on the North Downs, near Oxted), and at Folkestone; the work was at last finished in early September. Ironically, given his spat with Ramsden, the writing-up took William much more time than he probably expected. The drawings for the plates alone would have taken some weeks. The published paper that they illustrated was divided into eight sections. Starting with a description of the measurement of the base on Romney Marsh, William then gave comprehensive details of Ramsden’s theodolite and of the ancillary equipment that was



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required for its operation. The novelty and accuracy of the instruments were such fundamental parts of his belief that truth had been achieved in the fieldwork that he felt it was incumbent upon him to describe all of the equipment in detail. Nevertheless, the meat of the paper was contained in three sections in which he set out the calculations required to determine the triangles between Windsor and Dunkirk and the latitudes and longitudes of the stations at which observations had been made. All the painstaking mathematics behind the computations was set out. One particular aspect that he was concerned to explain was how spheroidal (as opposed to plane) geometry had been taken into account, even though the effect of this was minimal. Although William was subsequently accorded much of the credit for this spheroidal geometry, it seems to have been largely the work of Isaac Dalby, a self-taught teacher of mathematics who had been recommended as an assistant by Ramsden.106 In searching, as usual, for sources of error, William also devoted a section of the paper to the effects of terrestrial refraction – the bending of light as it passes through the atmosphere, a factor which diminishes with altitude. Although he decided that the effect was small, he still thought that it was worthwhile to flag it as a topic for further research. In his conclusions107 he praised the accuracy of the instruments that he had used and celebrated the success of the method that he had argued for in his paper of 1787, asserting that the excellence of the equipment would guarantee that this was the future of surveying. The angles of the triangles have been observed so truly, that the relative geodetical situations of the stations, as determined by plane trigonometrical computation, may be said to be free from sensible error. The instrument too, by means of its transit telescope, being admirably calculated for determining with great precision the true direction of the meridians, their convergence to each other, and consequently the differences of longitude, have thereby been obtained by angular measurement alone without any regard to difference of time, more or less erroneous even with the very best time-keepers … we presume to think that the results of the operation [by angular measurement and the use of the flares] has fully verified the goodness of the method by the consistency of the pole-star observations among themselves. It may be said to be a new mode of surveying, by the help of the pole-star as a fixed point for preserving the accuracy of the operation, successfully carried on from meridian to meridian; and the same mode should be adhered to in future.

William’s goal of a national survey was never far from his mind and this project had provided the ideal foundation: national coverage was a logical extension from the work that had just been done.

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The trigonometrical operation, so successfully begun, should certainly be continued, and gradually extended over the whole island. Compared with the  greatness of the object, the annual expense to the publick would be a mere trifle not worthy of being mentioned. In reality, a chief part of the expence, namely that of fine instruments, has already been incurred; and it would be a pity indeed to suffer them to be laid up and remain useless. The honour of the nation is concerned in having at least as good a map of this as there is of any other country.

In the last section of the paper, therefore, he suggested a framework for the extension of the triangulation: west into Wales and north to the Orkneys, and for consolidating the links to France. Drawing on his own fieldwork, he even offered a shortlist of the best locations, from Somerset to Sutherland and from Beaumaris to Berwick, where bases could be measured.108 He was trying to design, for his successors, the future shape of national cartography in Britain. LAST DAYS, IN LISBON AND LONDON

The drafting of the paper for the Royal Society was protracted because William’s health was now deteriorating. London was no place for anyone with a respiratory condition. ‘The impenetrable mass of smoke’ had even held up the observations in 1787 between Shooter’s Hill and Argyll Street: so much so that ‘we were obliged to watch all night, till towards the morning the fires of London being extinguished, the white lights could then be intersected’.109 The winter of 1788–9 was particularly damaging to him and in the spring he spent two months in the mountains in Wales to recuperate.110 This provided only a short reprieve. With Dalby’s help the draft of the paper was completed, and on 2 November 1789 William wrote111 to Banks, sending him the illustrations and promising that, once Dalby had finished copying the text for the King, the original would be sent on so that Banks could ‘lay the whole before the Royal Society when you judge proper’. He also forwarded his accounts and receipts against the £2,000 that the King had supplied for the project. In an echo of the situation that David Watson had found himself in, more than thirty years before, William wrote that ‘you will perceive that I am minus in a considerable sum, which I cheerfully contribute for the promotion of science, in addition to my own labours, which certainly have not been small, in the course of the recent operation’. He had asked Dalby to correct the proofs of the paper when they returned from the press – a considerable endorsement of his assistant’s competence from someone who did not habitually delegate



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such things: ‘He is perfectly well qualified to do it properly.’ William himself could do no more. In his letter to Banks he wrote, The repeated attacks that I have had for some years past on my lungs, during the winter season, have induced me to listen to the earnest advice given me to pass the ensuing one in a milder climate than this island affords. Col. Dundas and I do therefore set out for Falmouth tomorrow to embark for Lisbon. I am sorry that I cannot shake hands with you before my departure.

It is impossible to be sure exactly what he had been suffering from for so long, but it is likely to have been some form of chronic bronchitis or pneumonia, possibly caused by tuberculosis or leptospirosis. Whatever it was, he had to leave the cold polluted air of London. The warmth of southern France would have been an obvious choice for him at any other time, but not in 1789; it was only a few months since the storming of the Bastille and the country was in turmoil. There were very positive reasons for choosing Lisbon, quite apart from the markedly warmer winter weather, for this was a capital city little more than a quarter of the size of London, with less airborne pollution. Even though some visitors did complain about the state of the streets, the centre had been largely rebuilt after the earthquake of 1755 that had flattened most of the urban area, a disaster that had traumatised much of Europe.112 The trading links with Britain were very strong: half of the foreign ships entering the port of Lisbon in 1789 were from the British Isles, so the British community there was well established. One of the consequences of this was that the city had become a popular destination for Britons recovering from illness, or at least for those who were able to afford it. William and David Dundas probably stayed in Buenos Ayres,113 one of the hills on the western edge of the city, ‘the suburb generally resorted to by strangers which possesses the advantages of pure air, and comparative cleanliness and retirement’. The diarist William Hickey had also stayed there in 1782 when he commented on the vibrancy of the welcome for an English visitor (he immediately received ‘at least a dozen invitations to dinner’) although he also watched so many of the expatriate invalids declining.114 William and David arrived with some introductions and personal contacts that they made use of. Joseph Banks had spent nearly six weeks in Lisbon on his way home from Labrador in 1766, becoming well acquainted with members of the British community, including Gerard de Visme with whom he maintained correspondence. William and David certainly got to know de Visme,115 who was a good contact as he had been in the city for more than four decades, engaged in trade,

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including diamonds and banking; he was also a generous host and much involved with the design and establishment of the gardens around his various houses in and around the city. More immediately, William had probably met a guest who had dined at the Royal Society Club in 1788: António de Araújo e Azevedo, the Portuguese ambassador to The Hague, who was an amateur botanist and a founder member of the Academia de Ciências de Lisboa.116 He would have been a fruitful conduit for further introductions, and so, if William and David Dundas chose to court it, social life in Lisbon promised to be congenial.117 The likelihood is that these two old bachelor soldiers, friends for nearly forty years, lived quietly enough; there is no record of how they spent their five months in the city, although no doubt they cast a critical eye over military infrastructure and, if the weather allowed, they may have inspected parts of the adjacent coast, as was their wont. Back in London, the progress of William’s paper through the usual channels of the Royal Society had been less than smooth. Banks had selected 28 January for the reading of the first part of William’s paper, a date on which he anticipated a good audience. Jesse Ramsden was in the room that evening and he was shocked by the criticisms of his tardiness that William had set out. He wrote to Charles Blagden, the Secretary of the Society, asking to see a copy of the text so that he could respond. Two days after the Society’s meeting, Banks wrote to William in Lisbon, asking for his instructions as to how far he should go in defending William’s stance. He supported William’s right to criticise Ramsden although he tentatively suggested that some of it should be toned down. William’s reply118 was not written until 6 March: he pointed out that he had praised Ramsden whenever praise was due [and he had been an enthusiastic customer for many years] but he felt that the reprehensible parts of his conduct should not pass without notice … but if you should judge otherwise, I beg you will have the goodness to smooth down Mr Ramsden’s back, by removing the whole or any part of the asperity of my mode of expression, in the manner you think best. You have my full leave to do it. No consideration upon earth will ever make me go through the same, or such another operation again, merely from the drudgery of having to do with such a man!

He told Banks that he planned to be back in London by the end of the month and, as he was worried about correcting some details in his paper, he thought that printing should be delayed. Some revisions were evidently made but Ramsden stuck to his line that he should be allowed the right to reply. The Council of the Society (no doubt guided by Banks,



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wishing to make peace) asked Ramsden for a simple account of the facts from his perspective, free from personalities. Within this statement,119 when it appeared, Ramsden wrote: ‘Nothing could equal my surprise on hearing the charges brought against me … by Major General Roy. I was the more affected by it coming from a gentleman with whom I considered myself in friendship and who had many obligations to me for my assistance.’ He was also hurt that a copy of the paper had already been sent to the King.120 William’s principal complaint had been that Ramsden had been slow in his delivery of the theodolite. Ramsden countered that he had been asked to make the best instrument for measuring horizontal angles that he could, within a limited budget, and that this had been constructed ‘on principles very different from what had ever been done before’. With its newly designed microscopes and micrometers, the divisions on the circle could be read to half a second, about 1/24000 part of an inch. ‘Those acquainted with the application of new principles in the construction of those more accurate instruments are sensible how much time must necessarily be employed to bring them to the perfection of the one in question.’ He conceded that some adaptation of the chain had been necessary, but in the repairs that were needed to the level and to a microscope, during the course of the fieldwork, it seems that William wanted speed, whereas Ramsden prioritised accuracy. It was perhaps inevitable that they would fall out when there were time pressures. They were both extremely – perhaps obsessively – meticulous and they respected each other for that reason, but here there was a clash of cultures: army discipline was quite incompatible with any thought of being late in meeting an agreement, even in the pursuit of accuracy. Moreover, they had both been embarrassed in front of the King. William returned to London at the beginning of April. After five months away, readjustment to life at home and in the War Office must have taken a little time. The weather probably did not help; it snowed in London on 11 April. William presumably made the corrections to his paper that he had planned, and he may have adjusted its tone to some extent to meet Banks’s wishes. On 22 June the temperature reached 86° F (30° C) which cannot have been comfortable for a man in frail health.121 Despite what he had written in his letter to Banks before his departure to Lisbon, it seems that William did not enlist the help of Isaac Dalby, either in the revisions or in the corrections of the proofs. Rather than appeal for assistance, the clouded and desperate judgement of a dying man was that he could not delegate these tasks. So he still had work to do to correct the proofs. The narrative text would have presented few problems, but simply checking that all the numbers and tables had been

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accurately set in type would always have been time-consuming. Now, for the first time in his life, his strength failing, he was less than meticulous. According to a later summary by Charles Blagden, the paper had been ‘much hurried towards the latter part, and not rendered so perfect as the General would undoubtedly have made it with more time and better health’. William’s dogged independence of action – backed by his powerful friends, Banks and Richmond – had long been a stimulus and driver for his initiatives, but it now worked against him, preventing him from delegating the final important tasks within the project. By the end of June he had corrected ‘all the sheets except the three last, but without comparing his manuscript copy with the original papers and observations’.122 Under pressure, on 30 June he stayed in the office until eight o’clock at night. The next morning, Thursday 1 July, after two hours of struggle, he died at home in Argyll Street.123 A comment in the press a few days later looked back two decades: The Republic of Letters will experience a great loss in the death of General Roy. As a draughtsman his pencil was universally admired, and his map with the Roman roads and camps in Scotland, which is now deposited in the King’s library, is a proof of what we have just asserted. He was a great favourite with His Majesty.124

Years before, in Clydesdale, an old retainer of the Lockharts of Lee, named Ann Alexander, often used to say that William came to the Lee on three occasions while she was there: on the first, he dined in the servants’ hall; on the second he dined with the family; and on the third visit he sat at the right hand of the laird. She would have been astounded at how far his life had taken him.125 There was one short final journey, although about this we know nothing. William had made no elaborate arrangements for his burial, leaving it simply to his executors to see that he was decently interred. He had died in the parish of St James’s, Westminster, and there is an entry for him in the burial register126 there on 7 July, but the site of his grave at St James’s was not recorded, nor was there any monumental inscription in the church. He was to have his memorials elsewhere, and they were perhaps more in the forms that he might have wished. NOTES 1. Reese 1987, 50–3, 60–71, 79, 82–5; Kingsley 1981, 91–6. By 1782 they had also produced good plans of Chichester and of Brighton. For the posts in the Tower Drawing Room, see Marshall 1980, 25–6, 40.



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2. Molleson 1783, 119, 137–8, 496. The Commissioners’ report was also printed in The Scots Magazine 44 (1782), 577–80. 3. Crosland 2005, 26–7. 4. HC4, 433–9 (M. H. Edney and N. Dew). 5. The Jews Harp, ‘a house of amusement …with bowery tea-gardens and thickly foliated snuggeries’, stood in what is now the southern edge of Regent’s Park, where the tennis courts are (Walford 1878), and the Black Lane was to the east of the present St Pancras Hospital. 6. Roy 1785, 388–9. 7. Wargentin 1777. 8. The mémoire is quoted in full in Martin and McConnell 2008, 356–7 and translated on 366–7. It is also transcribed in Close 1969, 13. 9. Roy 1790, 249n, 253, 256–8, pl. 11. 10. Roy 1790, 259–61. The cupula on the house of David Duveluz – a Swissborn merchant in the Royal Exchange – in Hornsey Lane, Highgate, was the only reference on the list to private property not owned by a Fellow. 11. Nevil Maskelyne (1787, 158–9) hinted at this in his surprise that Cassini had not quoted more recent published material. Forbes 1985, 173. 12. Seymour 1980, 14. 13. He later judged the mémoire to be ‘weak’ and that it ‘does not show the workmanship of a very able hand … Can he possibly suppose that our instruments at Greenwich will not determine [the latitude] as well as any they have in the Observatory at Paris?’ Blagden to Banks, 18  October 1783: Dawson 1958, 60, no. 81, quoted at length by Martin and McConnell 2008, 357. Blagden was elected as a corresponding member of the Académie in 1784: Martin and McConnell 2008, 367. 14. Guerlac 1961, 36–44; Crosland 2005, 27–8. 15. Magellan 1775 and 1779. In the latter he mainly refers to Shuckburgh, but he does cite William’s paper in the Philosophical Transactions, although not by name. 16. Wardhaugh 2016. 17. Carter 1988, 194–202; Howse 1989, 158–60. 18. Banks to Blagden, 13 October 1783: Chambers 2000, 64. Blagden to Banks 18 October: Martin and McConnell 2008, 357. 19. He also had relevant books by Bouguer, de Maupertuis and de La Condamine in his library, as well as Cassini de Thury’s Description Géométrique de la France: Christie 1790, lots 59 80, 193, 61; Roy 1785, 388–9. 20. Royal Society Archives DM 4 ff. 5–6, quoted by Seymour 1980, 14. 21. Minutes of the Council of the Royal Society, 29 July 1784. Roy 1785, 389–90. 22. Letter from William to Nevil Maskelyne, 11 December 1786: TNA OS 3/4. 23. Roy 1785, 378–8.

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24. Reynolds 1962, 94–6. 25. Maddison and Maddison 1954. The Georgian house was rebuilt in 1886; West Thames College now occupies the site. 26. Roy 1785, 392. 27. Roy 1785, 390–4. Somewhat belatedly, the minutes of the Council of the Royal Society record that it approved the scheme on 24 June. 28. Roy 1785, where the plan is included as pl. 16. Thomas Reynolds’s appointment as an Ensign was announced on 4 September: Caledonian Mercury, 8 September 1784. 29. Roy 1785. 30. Now in the Science Museum: inventory number 1900–0156, although the details of the handles at the ends differ from that of Roy 1785, pl. 17, presumably as a result of later adaptation (cf. Roy 1785, 395). 31. The Oxford English Dictionary cites William’s paper in the Philosophical Transactions as only the second use of the word ‘boning’ in the context of surveying. 32. Royal Society object no. 1900–157. 33. Connor 1987, 249–55, 266, 274–6. 34. Roy 1785, 461–76, pl. 20; McConnell 2007, 196–200. 35. McConnell 2007, 195–6. 36. Charles was an elder brother of William’s old friend, Robert: Robson 2012. 37. The second son of the Earl of Warwick, Greville was a friend of Banks, and had an equally wide sphere of interests. A patron of Paul Sandby and a buyer of antiquities from Gavin Hamilton, he was one of the founders of the Royal Horticultural Society. At this time he was the lover of Emma Lyon, later Lady Hamilton. DNB (M. P. Cooper 2014). 38. McConnell 2007, 113–15. 39. Roy 1785, 478. 40. Skelton 1962, 420, 423–6 (where the Instructions for survey are printed). See also Seymour 1980, 363–5, and TNA WO 30/115, ff. 183–8. 41. Porter 1889, 213–16, 519–22. Morning Herald & Daily Advertiser, 24 September 1784, 3. William’s fifteen shillings a day for his role as a Lieutenant Colonel was unaffected. 42. Morning Post, 19 November 1784, 2. 43. Martin and McConnell 2008, 358, 367–8. 44. Bennett 2006, 225. 45. Goddard 2017. The family would later engrave the plates for The Military Antiquities. 46. TNA WO 30/54, 10–15, quoted in Skempton et al. 2002, 587–8. 47. Whitehall Evening Post, 20 June 1782, 4. 48. TNA WO 46/18 (Gardner’s instructions) and WO 47/119; for the maps, see OS 5/2, MR 1199 and 1385, and also K.Top.11.80.a.8; Seymour 1980, 45.



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49. Widmalm 1990, 200–1. 50. The members of the Board were paid at a rate of forty shillings a day, with two shillings per mile for travel expenses (Public Advertiser, 18 April 1785, 4). The parliamentary debate is recorded in The Annual Register … for the Year 1786 (London 1788), 94–108, and in The Parliamentary History of England, 25 (February 1785–May 1786), (London 1815), 1096–1157. The unfolding episode is summarised by Reese 1987, 190–6. 51. For the relationship between Maskelyne and Banks, see Homes 2014, especially 245–53. 52. Letter from William to Nevil Maskelyne, 11 December 1786: TNA OS 3/4. For publication, the footnote in the Philosophical Transactions (Roy 1785, 389) was changed to say that Maskelyne’s comments and the mémoire would be added to a later paper. 53. Maskelyne 1787, 153. 54. William attended a Visitation on 29 July 1785 but not subsequent ones: Cambridge University Library RGO 6/22. 55. DNB (J. Betts 2004). One of the watches belonged to Alexander Aubert who was presumably in on the secret. 56. Forbes 1975, 148–50; Howse 1989, 152–3. 57. I am grateful to Rebekah Higgitt for this observation. Maskelyne may also have been wary of promoting anything other than his preferred lunardistance method. 58. Maskelyne 1787, 186. 59. Weld 1848, 189; Banks, quoted by Seymour 1980, 16. 60. Office of Ordnance 16 October, reported in London Gazette, 25–9 October. 61. TNA WO 30/115, 188; reproduced in Seymour 1980, 365. 62. The Public Advertiser, 3 December 1785, 3. 63. Hellyer and Oliver 2015, 10–11. 64. Roy 1787, pl. 9. 65. Close 1969, 19. 66. ‘General Roy, that incomparable Engineer, has formed some alterations for the Gibraltar works; they principally respect the Devil’s Tower, and the adjoining ground’, World & Fashionable Advertiser, 5 January 1787. For the Royal Academy at Woolwich: Whitehall Evening Post, 5–7 June 1787, 4. 67. ‘Copy of a paper put into HM’ys hands’ [by the Duke of Marlborough]: TNA OS 3/4. 68. TNA OS 3/3. 69. Cokayne 1890, 177–8 gives his rank as Lieutenant Colonel but the earlier regimental history has him as a Captain until his resignation in July 1771: Mackinnon 1833, 490–1. 70. Mary’s common name makes her difficult to identify. She may possibly have been Mary Gard, b. 1736 (St Gluvias, Penryn) who married Francis

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Hayes, a mariner, 15 May 1757, in Falmouth. They had a daughter, Catherine, b. Falmouth, 17 June 1758. Francis Hayes, a distiller, who may have been the same man, was buried at St George in the East, Tower Hamlets, 24 July 1761. There is no unequivocal record of the birth of Thomas Vincent Reynolds. 71. First set out in 1705, Poland Street was slightly less fashionable in the 1780s than it had been earlier: Sir William Chambers and Paul Sandby had successively occupied no. 58 in the 1760s, when the musicologist Charles Burney was at no. 50; Gavin Hamilton, from Lanark, is said to have lived in the street in 1779. 72. Caledonian Mercury, 8 September 1784. 73. Cokayne 1890, 177–8 where the administration is mentioned. His wife, Margaret, died only eight months later and, not surprisingly, there is no mention of Mary or the younger Thomas in her Will: TNA PROB 11/1142. 74. Westminster City Archives, Fire Insurance Policy Register 1777–1786. By comparison, William’s home was insured for £2,100: London Metropolitan Archives, Sun Insurance Offices Policy Registers (Old Series), MS 11936/363/556678. The cover, of course, may not have been comparable. 75. Caledonian Mercury, 25 November 1786. 76. TNA PROB 11/1194. 77. About James Livingstone of Shepperton, little is known. He made a Will (TNA PROB 11/1431) shortly before his death in 1805, and, extrapolating from this, it seems that he was born in Livingston, West Lothian, in 1728 (OPR 669/10 203) and married (probably clandestinely) Elizabeth Thomas of St James, Westminster, in 1749 in the May Fair Chapel (TNA RG 7 221; RG7 Piece 221/f. 75). His younger brother, William, with whom he had largely lost touch, worked for ‘the Clyde Iron Mills, near Glasgow’. 78. Whitehaven, a former fishing village that had been developed in the late seventeenth century, and which had become a prosperous port and new town, was still respectable but was now in recession (Collier and Pearson 1991). Catherine had been the teacher at the established boarding school for young ladies, in Lowther Street, owned by Joseph Durand (later Desvillers), but in April 1785 she took over the school in partnership with a Miss Hayward, ‘formerly mistress of the boarding school in Preston’, Cumberland Pacquet and Ware’s Whitehaven Advertiser, 8 February 1785, and 24 January 1787; see also advertisements there on 20 April 1779 (for a rival school) and 31 December 1782. 79. Lot 453 in The Decorative Arts and International Sale at Waddington’s Auctioneers, Toronto, 8–13 June 2019. William’s name and dates are written on a piece of nineteenth-century printed card which was used as padding to the clasp at the back of the metal surround of the ivory slip, all



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of which was sealed beneath the backing-paper on the frame. The picture was catalogued as coming from the collection of a specialist in eighteenthcentury antiques, Lorenz Biricz, who traded at 275 King Street East, Toronto, from 1964 to 2007, and who made many buying expeditions to Britain and Europe. Enquiries in 2021 about the provenance of the picture drew a blank. Maria Cosway did not paint miniatures, and I am grateful to Stephen Lloyd for his expert opinion that the Toronto portrait was not painted either by her or her husband, Richard. The press reports of the burglary from Clifton Wright’s flat (West London Press, 20 September 1929; West London Observer, 27 September 1929; Illustrated Police News, 3 October 1929) provided no details of the items stolen. A copy of the letter from Colonel Wright to General Willis was kindly supplied by Jean Barr of the Carluke Historical Society. The context of Wright’s letter was his offer to donate some of William’s papers to the OS; these are presumably those now in TNA. 80. James Bramham to Hugh Debbieg: Porter 1889, 219, 226–7. 81. Herrmann 1965; Bonehill and Daniels 2009, 102; National Galleries of Scotland D.5339A. Other portraits which have been suggested as being of William include two in the sitter-notes files of the National Portrait Gallery: one is a half-length portrait with an image of surveyors at the side, but the style of coat is of c.1740, too early for William; the other is an etching by William Baillie (NPG D 34575), but it bears the motto of the Royal Dragoons and is probably of Cornet Daniel Brown (BM 1870.0813.589). A cartoon of ‘The Antiquarian Society’ by George Cruikshank, 1812, includes a figure with Ordnance papers in his pocket; this is not William as has been suggested (O’Donoghue 1977, 29), but Henry Phipps, 1st Earl of Mulgrave, who was Master General of the Ordnance at the time. 82. McConnell 2007, 200. 83. Close 1969, 19. 84. Maskelyne 1787, 186–7. 85. Roy 1787. 86. Widmalm 1990. 87. Todhunter 1873, 147–8. 88. Immediately afterwards, in early March, he was collaborating with James Lind, in Windsor, to test the potential of determining longitude with Ramsden’s ‘instrument’ when it was finally delivered: Close 1969, 19–20; TNA OS 3/4. 89. A quarter of the books he bought in the last five years of his life were concerned with travel and exploration, including titles on Africa, Australia and North America. He had a copy of the Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa although he never joined the fledgling African Association. Christie 1790, including lots 38, 56, 206, 210.

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90. McConnell 2007, 212–13. Phillimore 1945, 164–6. The measurement of arcs in Bengal was begun by Reuben Burrow but never completed. For Rennell, DNB (A. S. Cook 2004); Allibone 1976, 130. 91. McConnell 2007, 201. 92. Described in Roy 1790, 136–60, pls 7–10. 93. The French were using a very different, and very much smaller and more manageable instrument, the new repeating circle designed by Jean Charles de Borda, which (from several averaged measurements) almost matched Ramsden’s theodolite for accuracy, with maximum errors of 8 and 2.8  seconds of arc respectively: McConnell 2007, 206; Martin and McConnell 2008, 361, 369–70; HC4, 686–7 (O. Chapuis). 94. Close 1969, 20. Such a large instrument must have caused quite a stir. 95. McConnell 2007, 204–5. 96. McConnell 2007, 205; Close 1969, 21. 97. Martin and McConnell 2008, 370. 98. HC4, 443–50 (M. H. Edney). An intermediate base at Dunkirk was used to bring the two national triangulations – which had used different units of measurement (feet and toises) – into coherence: Kershaw 2015, 142. 99. Close 1969, 21. A correspondent to the Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser (11 January 1788) mentions seeing ‘a kind of tent on top of the steeple’ of Tenterden church towards the end of October. 100. Fiddes was from Belhelvie, near Aberdeen; his portrait c. 1795 is in the Royal Engineers Museum, acc. no. 9309.15. Bryce was another example of William’s ability to gather round him the most competent individuals: as Major General Sir Alexander Bryce he was to become Inspector General of Fortifications in 1830: DNB (H. M. Chichester and D. Gates 2004). 101. Roy 1790, 114–19; Close 1969, 22; McConnell 2007, 205. On 8 December, the Board of Visitors of the Greenwich Observatory approved the loan of ‘Harrison’s Original Watch’ to William for the Greenwich-Paris project but there seems to be no record of if or how it was used: Cambridge University Library RGO 14/6. 102. For instance: Morning Herald, 24 November 1786; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 22 June 1787; The World, 22 October 1789. 103. Waterston 2006, 807, 233, 469, 740. 104. Howse 1989, 156–7; McConnell 2007, 89, 109, 141–6. 105. McConnell 2007, 206. 106. Seymour 1980, 22; DNB (E. Baigent 2004). Dalby – arguably the first member of staff of the Ordnance Survey – was a member of the team until 1799 when he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military College. 107. Roy 1790, 261–3. 108. Roy 1790, 263–70. 109. Roy 1790, 252–3; cf. Joseph Lindley’s difficulties at Hanger Hill Tower, Ealing: Lindley and Crosley 1793, 10.



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110. McConnell 2007, 201. 111. DTC, 6 (1788–9), 269. 112. Kendrick 1956. 113. Now in Estrela. 114. Anon 1800, 9–10; Murphy 1795, 110, 133–4; Hickey 1953, 371–3. 115. DTC, 7 (1790–1), 74–8. 116. Allibone 1976, 132–3. 117. Neither, perhaps, was seeking society. Dundas was described as ‘a brave, careful and well-skilled soldier … a tall, spare man, crabbed and austere, dry in his looks and demeanour …’ (Bunbury 1854, 29–30). 118. DTC, 7 (1790–1), 74–8. 119. McConnell 2007, 226–30. 120. William sent manuscripts of his Royal Society papers on geodesy to the King: Roy 1785, 1787 and 1790 are in the British Library: King’s MS 269, 271, 272. 121. ‘Meteorological Journal’ [for 1789], Phil Trans, 80: between pp. 271 and 273; Barker and White 1791, 93–4; ‘Meteorological Journal’ [for 1790], Phil Trans, 81: between pp. 42 and 43. 122. Blagden 1790, 591. 123. The Times, 2 July 1790; The Annual Register … for 1790 (London 1793), 212. 124. Kentish Gazette, 6 July 1790. 125. Rankin 1874, 293–4. 126. Westminster City Archives, St James’s burial register: 494/324, f. 2171; 494/344, f. 2176; 494/353, f. 2176. His body was probably laid in the vaults. The new burial ground for the parish, on Hampstead Road (only opened a few weeks beforehand), was severely affected by the expansion of Euston Station in the 1880s and by bombing in the Second World War. The remaining area was excavated in 2017–19 in advance of the construction of the High Speed 2 Railway and there is no indication that he was buried there.

7 Aftermath and Legacy: The Birth of the Ordnance Survey

OPERATIONS RESUME

T

he state moved swiftly to fill the vacancies caused by a death of a public servant, but the vultures had begun circling even more rapidly: on the very day that William died, Lieutenant General George Morrison, the Quartermaster General, wrote with haste to the Treasury, lobbying for his son to replace William as his Deputy.1 (He was to be disappointed.) William’s executors, David Dundas and James Livingstone, also set to very quickly: by 2 August they had arranged for James Christie to sell the house in Argyll Street, along with the majority of its contents.2 There is no indication of how much, if anything, William’s heir, Thomas Vincent Reynolds, had decided to retain, but he evidently had well-prepared plans to use the money now becoming available to him. In September he got married and soon began to acquire property around his wife’s home village in Essex.3 The progress through the press of William’s paper on the GreenwichParis project had, of course, stalled. It was picked up by Charles Blagden who, by early August, had identified ‘several mistakes and blunders … principally in the numbers’. He had discussed some of these with William before his death and he had returned to it subsequently. Looking back to the earlier rows with Maskelyne and Ramsden, and conscious that the accuracy of a paper about Anglo-French cooperation was also a matter of national pride, he told Joseph Banks that there must be very strong presumptions that many other errors still exist, and from what happened with regard to the General’s former paper, there can be no doubt that the French commissioners, especially Mons’r Méchain, will very strictly



Aftermath and Legacy 251 examine not only the reasoning but likewise all the computations in the General’s account of his operation and consequently will detect whatever blunders there are.

Cavendish had suggested to Blagden that the paper should be worked over in detail and that any errors should be published in the same volume of the Philosophical Transactions. Isaac Dalby, who had worked with William on the mathematical aspects of the paper, was the obvious choice to take this forward.4 William’s paper had already been set up in type, so it could not be easily changed without considerable expense. The solution was for Blagden, at the end of the printed volume, to contribute a brief empathetic introduction in which he explained the circumstances and the gravity of William’s illness in the final stages of the genesis of the paper. Then came Dalby’s long appendix, extending over more than twenty pages, in which he explained the difficulties of resolving spheroidal and plane trigonometry, and how some of the methods of correction of the data that William had used had been a matter of judgement, and that they were therefore to some extent arbitrary. This had inevitably affected the figures arrived at from the observations of the triangles. In every case, Dalby was keen to show his working so as to make each correction clear; only that way could the computations be useful in the future.5 Altogether it was kindly done; the professional integrity of the exercise had been recovered and British honour in the collaboration with France had been defended. Elsewhere the executors had been busy. The sale of William’s books, maps and instruments took place in James Christie’s premises in Pall Mall on 3 and 4 December.6 Some of his old friends, especially Robert Bisset and Alexander Dalrymple, and also Hugh Debbieg, bought many items from the library. The biggest buyer of the maps was William Faden,7 a prominent map publisher and seller who spent the considerable sum of £16 7s 6d on the Cassini sheets of France, on Mackenzie’s surveys of coasts and harbours, and on a large number of sheets of English and Scottish counties. These county maps, dealing with the basic units of sub-national administration, had been growing in numbers and sophistication throughout the eighteenth century and were an important foundation of what was to come next in British cartography. William’s scheme of 1766 had recognised that although these maps were inconsistent in quality, they had the potential to provide the topographical detail if a geodetic framework could be supplied to support them. William himself had subscribed8 to many of the county initiatives, ranging in date from Benjamin Donn’s map of Devon, published in 1765 (when his own

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ideas were still being formulated) to John Evans’s map of North Wales which was not to appear until 1795. Until about 1750 the map compilers and retailers had ‘traded mainly in plagiarism’, largely copying what had gone before, but since then the standards of survey and mapping had markedly improved, alongside the rising quality of the necessary instruments and the wider recognition of the mathematics required. In 1769, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce had offered a prize of £100 for new county maps, at a scale of 1 inch to 1 mile, with the aim of improving transport and trade. (Given the costs involved, this was a marginal incentive; it was the input of subscribers that was vital to financing the survey work itself.) The 1-inch scale had become almost universal in England and Scotland (south of the Highland Line) in the second half of the eighteenth century and these county maps would prove to be ‘the closest ancestors’ to the 1-inch maps of the Ordnance Survey.9 After his experience in the Military Survey of Scotland, with its poor framework, William will have been acutely aware that many of the county surveys were well founded on trigonometrical survey. Beighton’s map of Warwickshire (1729) was the first to have had this as a basis and thereafter it had become increasingly common: by the 1760s it was well established. Although some private surveyors had extended their triangles well beyond the county boundary, creating almost regional surveys, there was no wider coordination. The schemes that William envisaged, accelerated once more by Cassini’s mémoire in 1783, introduced the much greater standards of accuracy and much longer distances that would be necessary to support a national geodetic framework; he also enabled and promoted the vastly improved measurement of elevation, something which (with the exception of Christopher Packe, in Kent) had not been a feature of county mapping. Almost incidentally, a national survey would also inevitably provide consistent standards of depiction, in terms of conventional signs, and thus the ability to move across boundaries, things that the county surveyors could not do. William had therefore been keen to support good county mapping. The first private scheme to benefit directly from his work on Hounslow Heath and the triangulation to Dover was the map of Surrey that was surveyed in 1789 and 1790 by Joseph Lindley and William Crosley.10 Lindley had been Nevil Maskelyne’s assistant at Greenwich and had been sent on the ‘chronometer run’ to Paris in 1785:11 now he approached William for help and he was generously provided with the data on the positions of seven places in Surrey which he could use as his primary stations in the new triangulation.12 Lindley aspired to meet William’s



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standards, but he honestly accepted the shortcomings of his project, not least in the provision of the topographical survey by his colleagues: some earlier material had been incorporated, and a perambulator had been used for the road traverses, instead of a chain. The map of Surrey therefore looked both forward in the standards of its geodesy, but also backwards in accepting the older traditions of cartographic method. Lindley himself had an eye on the future, even, he wrote, ‘to the antiquarian of the 25th century’ who might be grateful for the knowledge that the map (and its associated memoir) contained.13 In his own projects, William, so long the champion of a national survey, had helped to bring British cartography to a point of transition, ready at last to adopt the standards and consistency that would be necessary for the mapping of the British Isles. Although he had left the stage, he had bequeathed a powerful intangible legacy in the interests and loyalty of his friends. Apart from the King, the most important of these was the Master of the Ordnance, the Duke of Richmond, who, from his experience in Sussex, was not only conscious of the strengths and weaknesses of county mapping, but also of the role of consistent and accurate surveys in the defence of the realm. Moreover, he was also in a position to do something about it, and by July 1791 his revived ideas were coming to fruition. An additional stimulus, for him, was probably a wish to consolidate the position of the Board of Ordnance, not least in the opinion of George III who was intensely interested in topographical studies and who had consistently supported William’s projects in the past. Richmond now secured the blessing of the King ‘for proceeding the Trigonometrical Operation begun by the late Maj. Gen. Roy’. He had also seized the opportunity to obtain an even better theodolite.14 This was the instrument that the East India Company had ordered from Jesse Ramsden for the geodetic work that, on William’s recommendation in 1787, it had intended to undertake in Bengal. Ramsden, however, had gone beyond his brief, introducing a number of improvements without the prior consent of his customer, and then asking a higher price than had been agreed. The directors of the Company turned this down, allowing Richmond to step in and snap up the equipment for £373 14s. There were other improvements to be made: although William’s triangulation between Greenwich and the Channel coast ‘had been carried out with vigour and with skill … its great weakness was in the calculation’.15 Richmond therefore had to strengthen the mathematical expertise that would have to be applied to a much more extensive triangulation. Having consulted Charles Hutton, now the Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, he appointed Isaac Dalby,

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who thus provided a direct connection between William’s work and that of the new Trigonometrical Operation. Richmond entrusted the direction of the latter to Major Edward Williams of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, with Lieutenant William Mudge as his assistant; they were the successive directors until Mudge’s death in 1820. At this initial stage, the Trigonometrical Operation was seen as a purely scientific pursuit, providing the framework for the topographical mapping that would furnish the detail; indeed, the two elements were separately organised within the Board of Ordnance until 1800.16 The trigonometry – appropriately funded by the state – could also support the work of other map-makers, as it had already done for Lindley in Surrey. The nature of science is that it should always be moving on. William had devised and demonstrated the standards that he thought possible, but, since then, the theodolite had been improved and, through Dalby’s corrections, it had been recognised that the basis for some of the calculations had not been made sufficiently clear. These factors, together with the post-project evaluation of possible movement in the trestles and of the glass tubes that they had held, prompted a re-measurement by Mudge of the base on Hounslow Heath, ‘not on account of any doubt being entertained of the care with which General Roy’s operation had been performed, but solely with the view to bring this new mode of measuring to some proper test’.17 The momentum of the scientific work had been regained. The result – 27,404.3155 ft – was 0.4064 ft less than William’s; after further corrections, a mean of 27,404.2 ft was arrived at.18 This was the figure that was then used for the new triangulation, which (reusing some of William’s survey stations) by 1798 had covered all of England to the south of a line between London and Bristol; by 1822 it had been extended to the Shetlands. There had been important refinements, but little had changed in the methods of calculation used by Mudge. So improvements continued. The locational relationship between Greenwich and Paris was re-measured for the Board of Ordnance by Thomas Colby and Henry Kater in 1821–3 as part of an arc of meridian from the Balearics to the Shetlands; the high standards of this work reduced the earlier errors in longitude but the results that had been achieved by William, a generation beforehand, remained respectable.19 Thus, the distance from Fairlight Down (near Hastings) to Folkestone was found to be 154,807.00 ft, an increase of 4.30 ft, and that across the Channel between Dover and Notre Dame in Calais was 137,471.99 ft, an increase of 12.27 ft. Important as the science had been to William, it was also the means to an end that would provide the best possible framework for the mapping



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of the whole kingdom; that, in turn, would facilitate the defence of the realm, a topic which had been of central concern to him all of his working life. In 1795, two years after the resumption of hostilities with France, Richmond directed20 that the triangles be filled with ‘a distinct local survey of the country’, giving a strong impetus to the topographical survey. However, if this was to make an effective contribution to military planning, the printed products would have to have a degree of consistency that the publishers of individual county maps could not guarantee. Consequently, it was inevitable that Britain would move towards a centralised system of producing printed maps, in line with what was happening in Europe, not least in France in Denmark. William seems to have foreseen this as an ideal in his proposal for a national survey in 1766, when he had envisaged that the 1-inch maps would cover an area 30 to 40 feet square.21 After his experience in Scotland, and from what he had seen during the Seven Years War in Germany, he will have also realised that printed sheets were essential if they were to be distributed to the commanding officers involved. However, a national approach of this kind was still in conflict with the emphasis on the county as the established unit for administration in Britain. It is clear that the mapping of Kent and Essex in the 1780s and1790s was initiated on this county basis. Even though both banks of the Thames estuary – the approach to London – had been surveyed already, the move to map the rest of Essex reveals that national coverage was still conceived22 as a series of county maps, tied together by a wider geodetic framework, rather than as continuous sheet-by-sheet coverage (which was not achieved until the later twentieth century). The privately produced county maps of the eighteenth century were to cast a long shadow. The invasion coasts and the defence of the capital were once again the priorities. William’s heir, Captain Thomas Reynolds, who had probably benefited from some reflected glory within the army and the Board of Ordnance from his association with the General, seems to have been approached by the Duke of Richmond about making a map of the Southern District. In December 1791, in a shaky hand, lacking in confidence, he had ‘humbly submitted’ some queries to the Duke about the timetable, specification and resources for such a map.23 William would probably not have been impressed by his suggestion that a bastard scale of six-tenths of an inch to the mile would make the map ‘more portable’. Nevertheless, Reynolds was appointed to the Trigonometrical Survey in 1792, although little more than a year later he seems to have been on the topographical side, engaged in making ‘a military map of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and part of Hampshire’ – in the Southern District – by ‘flying

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sketching’, before moving on to the Eastern District and then farther afield.24 In 1801 the map of Kent that had been surveyed by the Board of Ordnance on the back of the Trigonometrical Survey, was published by William Faden who (unlike the Board) had an established system for its sale and distribution. It was not until 1810 that the map of the Isle of Wight became the first to bear the title ‘Ordnance Survey’, and a new identity was born.25 It was not only the Board of Ordnance that was making use of the dataset from the trigonometrical survey; indeed, there was a rather naïve expectation on the part of Edward Williams that the information would be picked up by others without any detriment to the Board.26 Commercial map-makers were quick to see the potential that this offered them, one of the first beneficiaries being Thomas Milne for his Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (1800), a pioneering land-utilisation map.27 Indeed, the commercial sector was so keen that by 1816 the Board had to issue a warning that those infringing their copyright would be prosecuted. But the enthusiasm for accuracy was strong, and in this context William’s name was invoked, often, it seems, as an assurance of quality. Sometimes indeed, accuracy of location was seen as an end in itself: in 1817 it led to the publication of one of the stranger maps of the time: [James] Edwards’ Trigonometrical Land Chart, ‘in which the situation of churches and other remarkable objects are deduced from the late Major General Roy’s baseline on Hounslow Heath and from the very accurate trigonometrical surveys since carried out by Lieut Col Williams, etc.’. Extending from Windsor to Beachy Head, at a scale of a little under three miles to an inch, this map28 pinpoints the position of nearly 350 buildings and survey stations, and William’s baseline, but no roads nor topography whatever. Its lack of any utility is baffling. A more conventional example of William’s name being cited is offered by Richard Laurie’s New Plan of London and its Environs … founded on the trigonometrical operations of the late Genl. Roy … which went through seven editions between 1821 and 1854. And it was not only William’s trigonometrical legacy that had been in demand. In 1805 Aaron Arrowsmith, an avid copier of earlier material, had learned of the existence of the Military Survey of Scotland in the King’s Library29 and he used it as a basis for his own map of Scotland, published in 1807, which was reissued four times until 1849. Almost simultaneously, William Faden produced, at seven miles to an inch, ‘A map of Scotland drawn chiefly from the topographical surveys of Mr. John Ainslie and from those of the late General Roy’; this too utilised the Military Survey and was reissued until the 1850s, so William’s



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name was not forgotten, two generations after his death and a century after his work with David Watson.30 NON-CARTOGRAPHIC LEGACIES

Before the end of 1790, William’s executors had acted on his suggestion that the ‘books of antiquities’ should go as a bequest to the Society of Antiquaries, and the Secretary of the Society was directed to make a list of the drawings that had been received. In his Will, leaving little to chance as usual, William had flagged hopefully that ‘if at any time the collection [the drawings and text] should be published, the King’s Copy would be the best to engrave the drawings from’. The Society was minded to take up the opportunity, and in May a committee was appointed ‘to direct and superintend the engraving of the plates and printing the letter-press’ of The Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain.31 In February 1793 the committee reported that it had checked the Society’s drawings against those held by the King and had collated the text; further, ‘it had been judged proper to publish the work from the manuscript, without any commentary or deviation from the style and orthography of the original’. The members of the editorial committee seem to have regarded the text as sacrosanct (hence, for instance, the retention of the extensive and idiosyncratic explanation of how the theories of the shape of the Earth had a bearing on the scale of the maps32) although they did make some alterations to the illustrations where they thought it was justified by the evidence from the two sets of drawings. Few reviews seem to have been published. The first to appear, in The British Critic, in September, was gushing in its praise, calling the book ‘a work of uncommon splendor and magnificence’ and ‘an ornament to our age and country’. The section on the Antonine Wall ‘evinces the most unwearied assiduity, is full of acute and ingenious remark, and shows an intimate knowledge of all the writers, ancient and modern, who have made any attempts to elucidate this intricate subject’. The Monthly Review largely agreed: ‘few posthumous publications have been sent into the world with such distinguished magnificence’, but the reviewer thought that William’s style in dealing with castrametation and the organisation of the Roman legion was dry and prolix (raising a question, perhaps, about what he had expected) and that the editorial committee should have been more prepared to adjust and prune the text.33 In a broader cultural context, a later judgement was that William, ‘empirical, questioning, practical … [with a] lucidity and formality of

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classical thought and language’, was quite alien to the romanticism of Walter Scott that was soon to gain such popularity. Scott himself (in The Antiquary, 1816) could not resist holding such analysis up to ridicule.34 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the romantic antiquarianism that Scott had propounded had given way to a more rigorous approach and field archaeology had returned to the consideration of the inclusive evidence that William had pioneered in his work on the Roman camps; nevertheless, it still took until the mid-twentieth century, after the Second World War, for William’s standards in the surveying of earthworks to be equalled. The direct effect of The Military Antiquities on later cartography, especially outside Scotland, is difficult to pin down. By the end of the eighteenth century the depiction of antiquities had become acceptable to map purchasers, and some of the commercial map-makers had included the more prominent archaeological remains on their county sheets. This practice was continued by the young Ordnance Survey, most especially in Wiltshire under the influence of Sir Richard Colt Hoare who had been one of the original recipients of William’s book. Indeed, the need for this information to be depicted was recognised in 1816 when William Mudge issued a list of instructions35 designed to improve the standards of the topographical survey: these included an order that ‘the remains of ancient fortifications, Druidical monuments, vitrified forts and all tumuli and barrows shall be noticed in the plans whenever they occur’. Although the meeting of this standard depended to some extent upon the predilections of the individual surveyor, the upshot was that in the later nineteenth century the Ordnance Survey maps provided what was, in effect, the first national survey of antiquities, and the plans that they offered were to be fundamental to the organisation of the archaeological field recording undertaken by the Royal Commissions on Ancient Monuments when they began work in 1908. These activities, and the work of the Archaeology Branch of the Ordnance Survey itself between 1920 and 1983, underpins the active national and regional datasets in British archaeology today.36 Although the products were intangible, part of William’s legacy took the form of the careers of his junior colleagues, especially those who had benefited from his personal recommendations within the system of patronage, from his leadership of the Survey division within the Engineers, or who had worked with him in person. The foremost of these was Thomas Vincent Reynolds, his heir, who had been responsible for the survey of Hounslow Heath in 1784. During the 1790s, Reynolds’s career progressed very much as William might have wished. By 1795 he had advanced to



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become a Major in the 30th Regiment (of which his benefactor had been the Colonel), and in 1798 he completed the reports attached to his surveys of the south and east coasts. These reports have been described (ironically, given what came later) as ‘a model of lucidity and commonsense’,37 and they include the recommendation that a series of ninety-eight coastal towers should be built from Great Yarmouth to Littlestone, in West Kent. In putting this forward, Reynolds cited the strength of the tower at Mortella Point, in Corsica, which had been finally besieged in 1794 by General Sir David Dundas (whom, of course, Reynolds knew well). This scheme, the predecessors of the Martello Towers, was not taken forward until Captain Ford successfully revised the idea for Dundas in 1803.38 Nevertheless, Reynolds’s star continued to rise. Living in Charles Street, Manchester Square, he seems to have had extensive interests in property in several streets in Soho, in addition to the land that he and his wife owned in Essex.39 In demonstration of his changed status, in December 1797 he successfully sought a grant of arms and a crest;40 perhaps his inability to succeed to the Ducie titles and estates still rankled. He also made a Will, naming William’s old friend Robert Bisset as one of his trustees who, in the event of his death, were to sell his property on behalf his wife and children.41 Meanwhile, his advancement continued: in January 1799 he was appointed as a brevet Lieutenant Colonel in the 30th which, later in the year, went out to Malta as reinforcements in the blockade of the French, holed up in Valletta. This, however, was to be the peak of his career, for at the beginning of July 1800, at the age of about thirty-six, an unknown ‘calamity’ incapacitated him, and this led to his retirement a year later. Worse was to follow. On 30 July 1801, in the Free Masons Tavern, Lincoln Inn’s Fields, there was an inquisition42 by His Majesty’s Commissioners who were directed to inquire into the lunacy of Thomas Vincent Reynolds of Charles Street, Manchester Square, and now residing at Old Brompton in the Parish of Kensington … [A jury of seventeen men, under oath, found that Reynolds] is a lunatic or of an unsound mind and does not enjoy lucid intervals so that he is not capable of the government of himself, his manors, messuages, lands, tenements, goods and chattels, and that he hath been in the same state of lunacy ever since the third day of July [1800] but how or by what means the said Thomas Vincent Reynolds so became a lunatic the jurors aforesaid know not unless by the visitation of God.

The Commissioners noted that Thomas Matthew Reynolds, the eldest son and heir, was only aged seven at the time. No other details of

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this family tragedy are known. In 1816, when Thomas Matthew had attained his majority, the High Court of Chancery instituted the sale, at Great Baddow, Elizabeth Reynolds’s village in Essex, of Thomas Vincent’s ‘freehold and copyhold estates … consisting of messuages, arable, meadow, and pasture land’ in several lots.43 Thomas Vincent Reynolds himself survived for a further nineteen years, and was buried in St Luke’s, Chelsea, in October 1835, aged 71.44 By that time the family fortunes must have been severely depleted. Thomas Matthew, the son, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, also joined the army but was less successful. In the censuses of 1851 and 1861 he was a Lieutenant on half pay, living in middle-class areas of Kensington, but when he died his effects were valued at less than £100.45 Through two generations of ill luck, the prosperity that William had accumulated had been entirely dissipated. A NAME FOR ACCURACY AND UTILITY

William may not have had a conventional memorial of the kind that he had provided for his brother, James, in Prestonpans, but he had others. One of the most enduring has been his own surname, for a curious element of William’s legacy is the apparent ease with which his simple, memorable name became associated with various objects or projects, irrespective of whether this was fully justified. The most obvious example of this is the Military Survey of Scotland which had been conceived, initiated and largely funded by David Watson. In all justice it should have been called ‘Watson’s map’, but William had been put in charge of the day-to-day operation and he outlived Watson by nearly thirty years, during which time the survey gradually became ascribed46 to William only: ‘Roy’s map’. This was certainly the case by 1806 when Aaron Arrowsmith interviewed David Dundas.47 Similarly, the ‘Instructions on Reconnoitring’ that William had produced in about 1750 for the newer recruits to the Military Survey originally appeared under Watson’s name, but by the time that they were printed48 in the 1780s they were firmly titled ‘General Roy’s Instructions’. Much later, when William began the preparatory work for the measurement of the baseline at Hounslow Heath, he used a brass 42-inch scale as the standard of measurement. This, which became known as ‘General Roy’s scale’ had been an opportunistic purchase on William’s part and had actually been made by Jonathan Sisson and divided by John Bird in 1742. Its quality, and the part that it had played in the initial stages of the triangulation, led the members of a Royal Commission on weights



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and measures to recommend in 1819 that the Roy scale be used as the national standard, although the following year they changed their mind. It survives in the Science Museum, its wooden case still bearing its acquired name: General Roy’s 3-feet Standard.49 More abstrusely, the mathematical calculations made during the Greenwich-Paris project included a formula for computing the spherical excess in a spherical triangle; in the nineteenth century this had become known as ‘General Roy’s Rule’,50 even though the work had been largely done by Isaac Dalby, writing within William’s posthumous final report. A late appearance of William’s individual work stemmed from his responsibility to report on the defence of the coasts. In the 1850s the fears of a French invasion were again prevalent, stimulating the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Defence of the United Kingdom (1859–60). The Commission’s recommendations were not implemented but, a year later, the influential Secretary of the Commission, William Jervois, who was evidently well acquainted with William’s Military Description of the South East Part of England (1765) sent a copy of it to the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston.51 A century after it was written, its observations, especially those concerned with the safeguarding of London, were still seen to be practical and relevant, and perhaps better value for money than those of the Royal Commission. At the end of his life, William was consciously looking to the future, and he was well aware that one particular aspect of his legacy needed to be established permanently. This was the accurate and durable fixing of the position of each end of the baseline on Hounslow Heath which, in 1787, had been marked on a brass cup in the end of a wooden pipe held vertical at the centre of a robust wheel, sunk in the ground. At the close of his last paper to the Royal Society, he wrote: Finally, in order to preserve the primitive scale of distances, whereon the accuracy of the recent operation, and all future ones that may hereafter be connected with it, must always be supposed to depend, it is i­ndispensably necessary to establish without loss of time, some permanent marks at the extremities of the base on Hounslow Heath. These should be low c­ ircular buildings, rising but a few feet above the surface of the Heath, composed of the hardest materials, such as granite, and constructed in the most durable manner by dove-tailing the stones into each other. They would resemble those basements [sic] of ancient crosses we often meet with, formed into regular steps, whereby the ascent is rendered easy to the top of a circular table or platform, of sufficient dimensions for the reception of the great instrument on any future occasion. In the interior part of these little buildings, metal tablets would be inserted, containing the name of that much-beloved monarch in

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whose reign the operation was begun, and these buildings executed; the distance from one to the other; the angle of the base with the meridian; and also the magnetical variation.

He added that his friend and fellow Scot, the architect and civil engineer Robert Mylne ‘at my desire, was so obliging as to give a design for a building of this kind, which, being constructed nearly in the way of the Eddystone Light-house, executed by the ingenious Mr Smeaton, would answer very well’.52 The buildings would have been a wonderful memorial to science, but Mylne’s design was probably not even costed. In the end, a much cheaper and less monumental solution was adopted, one that was eminently appropriate for the Board of Ordnance. ‘Two guns were … selected at Woolwich by order of the Master-general, from among those which had been condemned for the public service, and [they were] sent to Hampton by water.’ A delicate operation for their accurate positioning then ensued at both ends of the base, entailing the preservation of the precise location of the centres of the brass cup while a pit was dug for each enormous cannon, 9 feet long, set vertically, muzzles upwards.53 Over time, their importance was forgotten until, in the 1920s, the Ordnance Survey resolved to mark the bicentenary of William’s birth. The cannons ‘were both uncovered after a search, one of them being under a dung-heap’, and commemorative tablets were fixed to them. In 1927 the Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, unveiled the south-eastern gun, now in Roy Grove, Hampton.54 Ordnance Survey staff were proud of their history, and in 1956 a permanent memorial to William, in the form of a ‘trig’ pillar, was erected on the site of his birthplace at Miltonhead (Figure 7.1). Somewhat stretching a topographical point, it was claimed55 that ‘He [William] had been born on top of a hill and so we were able to select the site for a triangulation station without reference to higher authorities.’ (It was an operational pillar, but a more recent visitor56 has summed it up: ‘No flowers, but this still feels the nearest I’ve come to a trig shrine.’) Further, in a unique act of pietas,57 in 1965 the Ordnance Survey began to publish a label there (Figure 7.2) on its maps: ‘Miltonhead (Site of the birthplace of General Roy)’. In these decades after the Second World War, writers such as O. G. S. Crawford, R. A. Skelton and R. A. Gardiner had kept the flame alight58 and in 1977 a major exhibition was mounted at the British Library: William Roy 1726–1790, Pioneer of the Ordnance Survey, curated by Yolande O’Donoghue. Much of this transferred to Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, in Kelvingrove, in 1978, where it formed part of an exhibition focused on William’s role



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Figure 7.1  ‘Here stood Miltonhead’. The 4th-order triangulation pillar, with its commemorative inscription, on the site of William’s birthplace. © Adam Welfare

in the d ­ evelopment of the archaeology of Roman Scotland.59 In the following year, the Greater London Council unveiled a Blue Plaque on 10 Argyll Street as the home of the ‘founder of the Ordnance Survey’. A pub in Poplar Way, Feltham, little more than a kilometre off the line of the Hounslow Heath base, was named The General Roy, and a road on the eastern edge of Carluke has been christened General Roy Way. Finally, after two and a half centuries, the Military Survey of Scotland appeared in facsimile60 in 2007 in a folio volume, although at a much-reduced scale. Completing the circle, William might have been amused, or bemused, that three of his lifelong preoccupations – triangulation and geodesy, archaeology, and the recording and analysis of landscape – would eventually be considered together, and that the physical remains protecting the ends of baselines, the cairns marking triangulation stations and the  benchmarks for levelling, would all become subjects of academic  study. By the later twentieth century these had become targets for excavation or were significant objects within schemes of landscape recording, thereby constructing an archaeology of the act of survey itself.61

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Figure 7.2  The label (centre) marking the site of Miltonhead, on the Ordnance Survey One-inch to the Mile Seventh Series, Sheet 61, Falkirk & Lanark, B edition, revised 1954–65, published c. 1966. Reproduced with the permission of The National Library of Scotland

Such an indulgent pursuit would have been unimaginable in the world of William’s childhood. Leading by example, John Roy had instilled in his children a sense of duty, hard work and public service. For William this was not expressed as a commitment to a church and a congregation but (moulded by the years on the Military Survey of Scotland) as loyalty to the King and to the defence of the realm. Even though he was comfortable that the Survey could fulfil its purposes for army commanders in the Highlands, he became increasingly conscious that this ‘magnificent military sketch’ was far from perfect as a product. Certainly, given the instruments that were used, its quality was astonishing; it was also beautiful, in a painterly way; its compilation was comparatively rapid and the sheets were informative to those who could read them. Nevertheless,



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it had two major deficiencies. The first was that it had lacked a robust framework on which to hang the topographical detail, just at the time that county mapping, and military cartography in Europe, were slowly turning to triangulation and trigonometry. The attempts, each winter in Edinburgh, to resolve the misclosures arising from the road traverses of the Survey must have occasioned despair, and this must have been deepened by the knowledge that there was a better way of doing things. The second deficiency was the almost total absence of height information, a resource which would not only be essential for a commander in the field (Do the gradients on this road make it suitable for the passage of artillery?), but which was also an essential part of any trigonometrical scheme. William’s consciousness of these shortcomings will have been intensified by his experience in the Seven Years War, in Germany, and particularly by his exposure to contemporary military practice in Europe. Service in the regular army had convinced him that a clear and consistent cartographic survey of the kingdom was required, a belief distilled into the unsuccessful proposals that he made when he returned from Germany in 1763. He spent much of the rest of his life pursuing that goal of a national survey and in making good the deficiencies that he was now able to see in the work that he had done in Scotland. One bonus of his formative years in the Highlands and Lowlands was that, from the beginning, his cartography had a map user (initially, army commanders) firmly in mind, and utility was to be a watchword for William throughout his career. Accurate surveys of a country are universally admitted to be works of great public utility, as affording the surest foundation for almost every kind of internal improvement in time of peace, and the best means of forming judicious plans of defence against the invasions of an enemy in time of war … each individual officer has repeated opportunities of contributing … towards its perfection; and these observations being ultimately collected, a map is sent forth into the world, considerably improved indeed, but which, being still defective, points out the necessity of something more accurate being undertaken, when times and circumstances may favour the design.62

This drive for the utility of maps was especially apparent in his work on the defences of ‘the invasion coast’ and of the approaches to London (Figure  3.5). William recognised that the army itself was changing, moving from siege warfare to battles in open country, a shift that underpinned the need for consistent high-quality mapping in guiding the strengths and weaknesses of any topographical choice for engagement or for the site of a camp. However, to be truly useful, a national survey

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would now have to cater for a much wider suite of needs than the military one. The world was becoming more complex, kingdoms were transforming themselves into modern states, and maps offered a convenient means for the sharing of knowledge, and supporting broader agendas, not least that of economic development. Like some of his friends, William understood how the institutions of the state and, crucially, the Royal Society, could be harnessed to cut through that complexity in the pursuit of patriotic and even personal objectives: ‘Banks desired fame, Cook desired promotion, and Roy desired to be useful.’63 At the same time, encouraged by the Society, the technology of scientific instruments advanced strongly in the second half of the eighteenth century, and was a world away from ‘the instruments of the common kind’ that had been used in the Military Survey in Scotland. William furthered this advance on two fronts: by doggedly pursuing sources of error through his experiments in hypsometry, and then in the measurement of the bases at Jews Harp and Hounslow Heath. A later Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy, in considering Hounslow Heath, was of the view64 that the project had been conducted ‘with a degree of accuracy of which, till that time, no one had dared to form an idea’. It was through William’s field methods, and his meticulous publication of the results, that he had gained this reputation for work of the highest quality, marrying the practical and the theoretical. In 1791 the instrument-maker George Adams65 wrote If practice were perfect, it is doubtful whether we should ever have been in possession of theory … If any wish to see the difficulties of rendering practice as perfect as theory, and the wonderful resources of the mind in order to attain this degree of perfection, let him consider the operations of General Roy at Hounslow Heath; operations that cannot be too much considered, nor too much praised by every practitioner in the art of geometry.

William made his share of mistakes, although in many cases these can be seen as the process of science moving on, as it should. Nevertheless, he was indeed immensely thorough, a deeply engrained habit that was well demonstrated by his exhaustive experiments in hypsometry and geodesy. It was George Shuckburgh’s work in the former that proved to be the more enduring, but William was a strong contributor to the experimental physics and to improvements in observational practice, just as he was on Hounslow Heath. He was no less diligent and innovative as a field archaeologist, in which his accurate and inclusive s­ urveying – born of exacting observation and analysis – was way ahead of its time and would not be equalled until the twentieth century. In none of these areas did he act alone: his study of the Roman military was stimulated



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by the inspired hunches of Robert Melville; in hypsometry he jousted constructively with Deluc and Shuckburgh; in geodesy he was aided greatly by the networking power of Joseph Banks and Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond, and by the mathematical skill of Isaac Dalby. He was, however, a leader at a time of change, ready to go alone, to embrace innovation, and to apply himself unsparingly to the pursuit of excellence, accuracy and utility. Consciously and unconsciously, he laid the foundations for what eventually became the Ordnance Survey, setting down the basic standards – and, perhaps, the culture and the ethics – that have enabled the organisation to take a high place in the international geospatial industry. During his lifetime, the reputation of this quietly determined man would lead the press66 to describe him simply as ‘General Roy, that incomparable Engineer’. NOTES   1. The colonelcy of the 30th Regiment was settled by 10 July and the post of Deputy Quartermaster General by 17 July (London Gazette, issues 13216 and 13218). General Morrison was so desperate to secure patronage that he wrote to the Treasury because the Secretary at War was out of town (TNA HO 42/16/89, ff. 252–5). He may also have supplied the inaccurate speculation (and wishful thinking) about the appointments that appeared in the press (Public Advertiser, 3 July 1790).  2. The World, 2 August 1790. The sale of the house, furniture and pictures did not go to public auction in the end; the timing and means of their dispersal are unknown.   3. Essex Record Office D/DNe T38/8 and D/DSu T37.   4. Blagden to Banks, 31 August 1790: DTC 7 (1790–1), 158–9.   5. Blagden 1790; Dalby 1790.   6. Christie 1790; Harley and Walters 1977.   7. Macnair and Williamson 2010.   8. Wallis and Wallis 1993, 118, 163–9.   9. Harley 1965. For an overview, Delano-Smith and Kain 1999, 49–111. 10. Harley 1966. 11. Howse 1989, 152–3. 12. Harley 1966, 373, 404–5. 13. Lindley and Crosley 1793, 71. 14. Seymour 1980, 22; Portlock 1869, 23. 15. Phillimore 1945, 166; Seymour 1980, 22. 16. Seymour 1980, 21–32, 44–8. 17. Mudge and Dalby 1799, 206. 18. Mudge and Dalby 1799; Seymour 1980, 34, 37. 19. Seymour 1980, 40–2.

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20. Seymour 1980, 45. 21. Fortescue 1927, 332. He did not offer any figure for printing; he may have felt that this was beyond his remit. 22. Seymour 1980, 47. 23. TNA OS 3/5. 24. Seymour 1980, 67–8. Hellyer and Oliver 2015, 11–12. 25. By 1858 the Principal Triangulation was complete and published; it was followed by the secondary and tertiary series that filled in the framework, and by the Retriangulation in the 1930s. Adjustments continued, just as they had done in the eighteenth century, as instruments improved, possible sources of error were identified, and a fully national structure was implemented (Seymour 1980). 26. Williams, Mudge and Dalby 1795, 474. 27. Bull 1956. 28. The remainder of the text in the cartouche on the map claims: ‘The distances of the objects are calculated (to a single foot) from the grand stations and by a very correct scale pricked down upon the copper plate itself (with the assistance of a magnifying glass) by which means this chart, though on a small scale, will be found much more correct than any map executed in the usual way, though on the largest scale ever yet published.’ 29. Arrowsmith 1807. 30. Moir 1973, 98–101, 212–13, 226. 31. Unpaginated notice after the title page, as printed. The progress of the book through the press was exhaustively described by Macdonald (1917). See also Hodson 2011. A facsimile, reduced in size to about 72 per cent, was published in two volumes by Gregg International of Farnborough in 1969. 32. Roy 1793, xii–xv. 33. The British Critic 2, viii, 6–12, 127–33. The Monthly Review series 2, 12, 381–8. The Military Antiquities was used extensively by George Chalmers (1807, 1–197) in his account of the Roman period in Scotland, although he was characteristically jealous and acerbic, writing (1810, 63–4) that the book ‘shows how little [William] was acquainted with the Roman localities of North Britain’, but his criticisms have not lasted well. 34. Piggott 1976b, 157. 35. Phillips 1980, 4–10; Seymour 1980, 54–5. 36. Halliday 2016, 44; Bowden and McOmish 2012, 34–5. 37. Notes and Queries 8.1 (January 1961), 30–1. 38. TNA WO 30/62, WO 1/783, pp. 297–9, WO 30/100, quoted in Clements 2011, 19–20, 23. 39. Guildhall Library MS 11936/410/677723. 40. West Sussex Record Office Add Mss 6816. 41. TNA PROB 11/1854. 42. TNA C 211/22 R54. 43. London Courier and Evening Gazette, 14 September and 3 October 1816.



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44. London Metropolitan Archives, St Luke’s, Chelsea, Grave Register, p74/luk/277. 45. 1851 Census: 24 Queen Street; 1861: 7 North Terrace, Alexander Square. England National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations). This early and gradual dispersal, following the Christie’s sale in 1790, may explain why hardly any of William’s possessions have been identified. 46. By 1785 if not before: Caledonian Mercury, 24 January 1785. 47. NRS RH1/2/523. 48. TNA WO 30/115B; for the printed version, NLS Adv.MS. 46.1.5, ff. 170–3. 49. Airy 1857, 623, 663, 665–6; Lyons 1944, 221–3; Connor 1987, 249–50, 253–5; Science Museum object number 1931–988, 1 and 2. 50. Todhunter 1873, 1: 138; Roy 1790, 118, 171, 192–200; Edney 2019, 199–200. 51. Durham University Library Archives Add MSS 469–70. 52. Roy 1790, 269. 53. Mudge and Dalby 1799, 223–5. 54. Close 1927; Kelsey 1961. The National Trust declined to take on the care of the cannons, and in 1944 the north-west one was removed to the offices of the OS because it lay in the path of a new runway. It was returned in 1972 and now stands beside the Northern Perimeter Road, Heathrow Airport, at TQ 07717678; the south-east one is in its original position at TQ13727098, in a gap between housing developed in 1947. The cannons were listed as historic buildings in 1983 (south-east) and 1997 (northwest). 55. Kelsey 1961, 31. The memorial was unveiled by the Director General of the Ordnance Survey on 4 May 1956: Miller 1956, 97. 56. ‘Campagvelocet’ on 16 September 2015: http://trigpointing.uk/trig/4842. 57. Welfare 2021. 58. Crawford 1949; Skelton 1962, 1967; Gardiner 1977. 59. O’Donoghue 1977; Adamson 1977. The material from London was augmented in Glasgow by finds from some of the sites that William had surveyed. 60. Roy 2007. The scale was reduced by a third, from about 1:36,000 to about 1:55,000. The Military Antiquities had been republished by Gregg International in 1969. 61. For instance: Jobey 1974; Welfare 1979; Lilley 2017. 62. Roy 1785, 385. 63. Clinkman 2012, 136. 64. Quoted in Portlock 1869, 258. 65. Adams 1791, 55. 66. World & Fashionable Advertiser, 5 January 1787.

Appendix 1 Chronology

1722 John Roy marries Mary Stewart, in Carluke 1723 Grizel Roy born 1726 4 May: William Roy born at Miltonhead, Carluke 1728 Susannah Roy born 1730 James Roy born 1745 August: Prince Charles Edward Stewart raises the Jacobite standard at Glenfinnan 1746 April: the Jacobite rebellion ends at Culloden 1747 William begins work on the Military Survey of Scotland as a civilian Assistant Quartermaster 1748 December: John Roy dies 1752 The Military Survey is extended to cover southern Scotland. William walks the south-western coast and along the Border First large-scale surveys of archaeological earthworks 1753 Survey of the Roman fort at Castledykes 1754 Robert Melville discovers Roman camps in Strathmore 1755 Fieldwork on the Roman camps in Strathmore and survey of the Antonine Wall December: appointed Practitioner Engineer 1756 January: appointed Lieutenant, 53rd (later the 51st) Regiment of Foot Start of the Seven Years War Survey of Milford Haven 1757 May: appointed Practitioner Engineer Survey of the coastline from Christchurch to Whitstable, and of strategic roads in Kent, Sussex and Surrey Assessment of tactical topography of the Home Counties Survey of Maiden Castle, Dorset



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William Stukeley publishes a commentary on De Situ Britanniae September: the raid on Rochefort December: William testifies at the court martial of Sir John Mordaunt 1758 June: the raid on Saint-Malo To Germany, erecting wharves for the troops at Bremerhaven 1759 In Germany with the 51st. August: the battle at Minden. Promoted to Lieutenant and then to Captain in the Engineers. Captain in the new Corps of Highlanders August to November: siege of Münster 1760 William’s plan of Minden/Thonhausen published and is cited at the court martial of Lord George Sackville Mapping in Germany September: night attack on Zierenberg November: expedition to Einbeck 1761 October: David Watson dies November: William promoted to DQMG and Major of Foot 1762 Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel of Foot in the army 1763 February: Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years War; William assisting with the repatriation of the troops from Germany Initial proposal for a British national cartographic survey 1764 Discovery of the Roman camp at Cleghorn. With James Roy in Edinburgh 1765 July: appointed as Inspector of coasts and hinterlands Moves into Great Pulteney Street July: compiles A Military Description of the South East Part of England August: visits southern Ireland November: begins the inspection of the demolition of the port at Dunkirk 1766 February: reports on the demolition at Dunkirk, making recommendations May: revised proposal for a national cartographic survey July: compiles General Description of the South Part of Ireland 1767 April: elected Fellow of the Royal Society September: James Roy dies 1769 June: reports on the defences of Gibraltar Surveys of Roman camps and the identification of Trimontium 1770 Reports on the fortification of Portsmouth 1771 Discovery of the Roman camp at Grassy Walls

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1772 Fieldwork in northern Herefordshire, in search of the site of the battle between Caratacus and Ostorius Scapula William’s work on hypsometry begins after Deluc’s book is published 1773 MS of The Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain completed and presented to the King 1774 Mappa Britanniae Septentrionalis engraved Summer fieldwork in Scotland, from Lanark: hypsometry; Schiehallion; Chew Green November: elected to Council of the Royal Society December: Board of Visitors, Royal Observatory, Greenwich 1775 April: American War of Independence begins Reports on the quartering of troops in Jersey and Guernsey October: appointed Superintendent of Stores for the forces in North America November: a founder member of Joseph Banks’s Royal Society Club 1776 March: elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries 1777 July: Mary Roy dies August: promoted to Colonel in the army Hypsometry paper published in the Philosophical Transactions 1778 June: appointed as Commissary General Reports on the provision of magazines around London 1779 Moves to Argyll Street June: lays out and supplies the camps at Coxheath and Warley 1780 April: Susan Roy dies Reports on potential sites for camps in Essex 1781 October: promoted to Major General in the army 1782 May: gives evidence to the Commissioners of Accounts on expenditure in North America 1783 January, promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in the Engineers Measurement of the base between the Jews Harp and Black Lane, St Pancras October: the mémoire on the difference in longitude between the Observatories at Greenwich and Paris received from Cassini de Thury 1784 April–August: reconnaissance and field recording of the base on Hounslow Heath July: appointed Commanding Engineer, Surveying and Ready for Field Service



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1785 April: appointed to the Board of Land and Sea Officers, examining the defence of the dockyards at Portsmouth and Plymouth April: reads his paper on the baseline at Hounslow Heath to the Royal Society Summer: Engineers surveying Kent October: promoted to Colonel in the Corps of Engineers November: awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society 1786 November: appointed Colonel, 30th Regiment of Foot December: William makes a new Will 1787 William publishes the method proposed for the GreenwichParis project in the Philosophical Transactions 1788 January: elected Fellow, Royal Society of Edinburgh 1789 November: travels to Lisbon 1790 February: the paper on the Greenwich-Paris project read to the Royal Society April: returns from Lisbon 1 July: William dies at home in Argyll Street William Mudge and Isaac Dalby complete and publish the results of the Greenwich-Paris project in the Philosophical Transactions December: Christie’s sale of William’s books, maps and instruments 1791 July: the Duke of Richmond buys a second, improved theodolite from Ramsden and resumes the ‘Trigonometrical Operation’ August: the base on Hounslow Heath is re-measured by Williams, Mudge and Dalby 1793  The Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain published by the Society of Antiquaries

Appendix 2 General Roy’s Instructions on Reconnoitring1

Orders and Instructions to be observed in examining, describing, representing, and reporting any Country, District, or particular Spot of Ground, that Officers or Engineers may, at any Time, be ordered to Reconnoitre and Report. 1st. As the Encamptments, Marches and every possible Movement proper for an Army to make in the Field, entirely depend on a just and thorough Knowledge of the Country, the greatest Care and Exactness should be observed in examining minutely the Face of the Country, and from Time to Time to make proper Memorandums of every Variety of the Ground; whether the Face of the Ground is Flat and Level, or interrupted with Hollows and deep Vales, always mentioning the Nature of the Soil in either, whether Dry or Wet, Clay or Sand, Rocky, Stony, or Smooth, in Tillage or in Grass; if enclosed, the Nature of the Fences and Largeness of the Enclosures; where Woody, the Nature of the Wood, whether Thick and Impassable, Copse, or grown Timber, and Open; the Extent of the Wood, or if cut, by few or many Roads. If there are any Bogs or Mosses, to be particularly exact in expressing the Nature of either, both as to their Size and Extent from North to South, and from East to West; if Deep and Impassable, or capable of being traversed, with very little Labour, by Foot or Horse. Where there are Meadows, to observe the above Directions in ­describing them. In all Places where the Country is cut by Valleys or Hollows, to be as explicit as possible in conveying a perfect Idea of the Bottom and Banks of the said Valleys, viz



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“Half a Mile N.E. of --------, is a deep narrow Valley, (or the Road crosses a deep narrow Vale), which lies S.W. and N.E. about Four Miles in Length, with little or no Difference in Bottom and Banks, from one End to another. The Breadth of the Bottom is about 200 Yards, and the Ground Firm, Plain, Rugged, Swampy, so as to be scarce Passable. In the Bottom of this Vale runs a River, or &c, whose Bottom is Firm and Gravelly, or deep Clay; (mentioning) the Breadth and Nature of the Banks, if High or Flat, and of easy Access; next the Banks, on both Sides; the Valley, Smooth and Firm, Rugged, Swampy and Spungy; covered with Furze, Copse, or grown Trees; the Heights of the Tops on each Side, and, lastly, the width of the Valley or Slope.” 2d. Carefully to follow the Line of the principal Roads, in the several Bendings and Turnings, marking the Breadth; and at every half mile’s distance, minutely expressing every Variation or Change that happens in the Road; if Narrow or Hollow, the Depth of the Hollow; if Broken and Impassable, leading through or near any Wood or Cover, and how far it may continue through or close to that Cover. If the Ground on both or one Side of the Road, will admit of shunning the above Inconveniency, by quitting the Road, and making Openings through the neighbouring Fields. To be particularly attentive to Mark every Lane Cross-Road, or Communication, that either Crosses the great Road, or may lead from Right or Left of it; mentioning the Distance where they run off in Right or Left, to what Place or Places they communicate, and how far they go. When you come to a Farm-House, small Village, or Country Town, to be particular and exact in describing the Situation and Extent of either, by mentioning the Number of Houses and Barns, and how supplied with Water. 3d. All Rivers or Waters, great or small, to be examined with the greatest Attention and Exactness; marking every where their Breadth and Depth in Floods and Ordinary Water, Nature of their Bottom, Height of their Banks, Nature of the Soil on both Sides, and the Access to the Banks, if Easy or Difficult. The above Directions to be strictly observed in mentioning and inserting every Ford across any River or Rivulet; and all Bridges to be particularly described, whether Stone, Brick, or Timber, Number of Arches, with the width of each, Thickness of the Parapet, if the Communications to the Bridge are free, and on commanding Ground, and the Nature of the Command.

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N.B. It is impossible to express how minute and careful one ought to be in examining the above Articles, so as to able to convey a distinct Idea of the Nature of any River or Water, which are always of the greatest Consequence to Troops in the Time of Service. 4th. If the Surface of a Country is Mountainous, or only broken by gentle  Height, to describe and minutely express the Nature of  the  Mountains as to their Ascent and Height, in what Direction  they  run, and how far, where broken or cut by Hollows and  Waters,  where covered with Wood or Waters, or any other Obstructions. If the Country is cut with rising grounds to be very particular in observing the same Mode of describing them. 5th. In reconnoitring, to avoid ever trusting any thing to Memory, but constantly to sketch and mark Memorandums with Method; and regularly in travelling the Road, and from Time to Time, at stated Distances, to collect, digest, enlarge, and vary these Memorandums and Sketches before quitting the Ground, so that every thing may be as correct, explicit and expressive as possible. Great and many are the Inconveniences that continually arise from not duly attending to this precaution, and trusting too much to one’s own Memory, which should therefore be avoided. 6th. At first setting out, if possible to measure a long Base and Intersect the most convenient Objects, and as frequently as the Nature of the Ground will permit, to make proper Measurements and Cheques to the series of Triangles in their proper Position. In an enclosed Country the only exact and useful Method to lay down such, is to trace the Roads with the greatest Exactness and Accuracy, always remembering that in Military Maps, nothing should ever be represented at Guess or Random; and that the Space of one quarter of a Mile truly laid down, is far more useful than an imperfect and loose Representation of an entire Country. 7th. When ordered to survey a Ground for Encampment, the Survey should at least contain Three Miles Diameter, in which ought to be expressed with the greatest Minuteness every Particular above-­ mentioned, the Advantages and Disadvantages of Water, if easy to come



Appendix 2: Instructions On Reconnoitring 277

at, if plenty and good, in Rivers, Rivulets, Springs and Ponds of Water, if clear and soft, or muddy and hard. 8th. To be particularly attentive to the Produce of each Part of a Country, and how inhabited; if abounding in Grass or Hay, or only for Pasture, if chiefly in Corn, and what Quantities of Hay and Straw are generally thought to be in the Country; all of which Particulars you may be easily informed, after some Acquaintance with a judicious Countryman. 9th. Every Representation must be laid down to a proper fixed Scale, when to represent a Spot of Ground proper for an Encampment or any particular Manoeuvre for the Troops: the best Scale is one of 500 Yards to an Inch, which is sufficient to shew every Part in its just Proportion, and to express distinctly the Nature of the Surface. General Sketches of a Country may be laid down to a Scale of Two Inches to a Mile; and when the Sketch is finished, the Miles to be constantly marked along the Roads with Red figures. As the before Regulations and Orders appear not only necessary but most convenient for the Good of the Service, it is General Roy’s positive Orders that upon all Occasions they should be observed with the greatest Attention and Exactness. NOTE 1. This six-page set of instructions – printed by A. B. King (His Majesty’s Stationer), 36 Dame Street [Dublin], n.d. but 1780s – is included in the Murray Papers 5 (Ireland) 1804–1808, National Library of Scotland, 46.1.5; a collection of papers relating to duties in the Quarter Master General’s Department.

Appendix 3 Glossary

Azimuth: an arc from the zenith that cuts the horizon at right-angles. Berm: in Roman defensive works, a narrow level strip between a wall and an outer ditch. Castrametation: the choice of site and design for a Roman, or later, military camp or fort. Circumferentor: a magnetic compass fitted with two vertical sights. Counterscarp bank: an earthen bank constructed on the outer edge of a ­defensive ditch. Cropmarks: the patterns revealed by aerial photography of the differential ripening of crops in arable fields – the plants remain green for longer over buried ditches and pits but parch out over buried walls and other hard features. Cunette: in fortifications, a drainage channel. Dividing engine: a machine for the accurate engraving of the scale on a scientific instrument. Equatorial instrument: a telescope on an equatorial mount which could be used to measure zenith and altitude. Equatorial mount: a mount for a telescope with an axis of rotation parallel to the Earth’s axis; by rotating the telescope around this polar axis a star can be kept in view. Geodesy: the measurement of the size and shape of the Earth. Glacis: a long tapering slope, formed of upcast, on the outer edge of a defensive ditch. Hillfort: late prehistoric settlement, enclosed by earthworks or walls and often u ­ tilising natural defences. Hypsometry: the measurement of elevation by observing variations in ­barometric pressure. Lunar distance: the position of the moon against fixed stars.



Appendix 3: Glossary 279

Manometer: a closed and calibrated vertical tube, with an open end submerged in water, by which air pressure could be measured. Meridian: an imaginary line between the Poles, and thus the north–south line in a particular place. Pyrometer: a device for the precise measurement of the expansion or contraction of metals or other materials when heated or cooled. Quadrant: an instrument for observing angles through a quarter of a circle, set vertically with a plumbline to measure altitude or zenith distance. Roman camp: a temporary defended enclosure for an army unit, bounded by a single slight rampart and ditch, often playing-card shaped on plan. Roman fort: a permanent garrison post, enclosed by walls of timber and turf or of stone, and by external ditches. Spherical excess: the amount that the interior angles of a spherical triangle exceed 180 degrees. Spheroid: an approximately spherical body. Theodolite: a surveying instrument, with sights or a telescope, which measures horizontal and vertical angles. In the earliest versions there was no telescope and only horizontal angles could be measured by sighting through vanes. Toise: a French unit of linear measurement, equivalent to 1.949 metres. Transit instrument: a long refracting telescope that could move up and down in the plane of a meridian, allowing accurate observation of the passage of a celestial body across that meridian. Zenith: the direction vertically upwards from a particular place. Zenith distance; the angular distance from the zenith to an observed star. Zenith sector: an instrument for measuring the angle between an astronomical body and the zenith, usually observed on a known meridian.

Abbreviations

BL The British Library DNB The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online) DTC Natural History Museum archives, Dawson Turner Copies of the correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks HC4 Edney, M. H. and Pedley, M. S. 2019 The History of Cartography, 4: Cartography in the European Enlightenment, Chicago K.Top. King George III’s Topographical Collection, British Library NLS National Library of Scotland NRAS National Register of Archives for Scotland NRS National Records of Scotland OPR Old Parish Registers: National Records of Scotland OSA  The Statistical Account of Scotland (J. Sinclair ed.), 21 vols, 1791–9, Edinburgh Phil Trans Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London RCAHMS Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland RCIN Royal Collection Trust Inventory Number TNA The National Archives, Kew

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Index

Note: italic indicates pages with illustrations Academia de Ciências de Lisboa, 240 Académie Royale des Sciences, Paris, 182, 204, 207, 235 Adair, John, 25, 136 Adam, Robert, 165, 196 Adams, George, 36, 60, 266 Agricola, Gnaeus Iulius, 121, 124, 144, 146, 148, 161 Agricola, The, 121, 127 Ainslie, John, 57, 256 America, 42, 65, 96–7, 100–2, 112, 187–9, 195–6, 203, 205, 272 Amherst, Sir Jeffrey, 66, 105, 190 Anderson, John, 153 Annandale, 145, 147 antiquities see archaeology Antonine Wall, The, 54, 60, 123, 127, 135–7, 138, 139, 140, 141–2, 150, 152, 158, 191, 257, 270 archaeology see Antonine Wall, Hadrian’s Wall, hillforts, Military Antiquities, Roman Ardoch, Roman fort and camps, 131, 133, 134, 135–6, 161 Argyll Street, London, 190, 191, 192, 206, 227, 238, 242, 250, 272–3 Arniston, 10, 54 Arnold, John, 222 Arrowsmith, Aaron, 34, 39–40, 44, 54, 56, 62, 161, 256, 260 Aubert, Alexander, 189, 192, 207, 245

Aubrey, John, 125 Auchendavy, Roman fort, 152 Azevedo, António Araújo e, 240 Ballater, 29 Banks, Sir Joseph, 46, 155, 167, 171–4, 180, 187–9, 196, 207–8, 210–11, 216, 218, 221–2, 233, 239–41, 250, 266 Banstead church, 211 Baradelle, instrument makers, 176 baselines, 205, 210–12, 213, 238; see also Jews Harp, Hounslow Heath, Romney Marsh Basire, James, 189, 219 Battledykes, Roman camp, 129, 132–3, 145 Bertram, Charles Julius, 149–51 Berwick-upon-Tweed, 41, 48, 118 Bevis, John, 170 Bird, John, 170, 192, 216, 260 Birrens, Roman fort, 52, 118, 120, 122 Bisset, Charles, 217 Bisset, Robert, 72, 77, 102, 227, 251, 259 Blagden, Charles, 172–3, 190, 207–10, 233, 235, 240, 242, 250–1 Blair Atholl, 33 Board of Land and Sea Officers, 220–1, 273 Board of Longitude, 170



Index 297

Board of Ordnance, 40, 52, 109, 180, 202–3, 220, 223, 254–6, 262 Board of Visitors see Royal Observatory Border, Anglo-Scottish, 28, 41, 48, 51, 118, 120, 270 Boswell, James, 168, 172, 193, 196 Bouguer, Pierre, 175, 182, 231 Bradley, James, 222 Brampton Bryan, Roman camp, 152 Brandon Camp, hillfort, 152 Braxfield, Lord, 7 Bremerhaven, 72, 74, 271 Bremerlehe, 78 Broadwood, John, 81, 168 Bryce, Alexander (father), 14, 16–17, 25, 38, 41, 235 Bryce, Alexander (son), 235 Burghead, promontory fort, 116, 117, 118 Burney, Fanny, 193 Burnswark, Roman camps and hillfort, 52, 118, 119, 120, 122, 131, 147, 161 Burrow, Sir James, 187 Burrow, Reuben, 103, 183, 184, 185, 248 Caithness, 15, 235 Calderwood, William, 174, 180, 190, 216 Callander, James, of Craigforth see Campbell, Sir James Caer Caradoc, hillfort, 152 Camelon, Roman fort, 137, 138 Campbell, Dougal, 14, 17, 20, 42 Campbell, Sir James, 9–10, 16, 72 Canterbury, 66, 84, 175 Carluke, 1–7, 17, 59, 144, 188, 228, 263, 264 Kirk Session, 5–6, 58 see also Hallcraig, Kirkton, Lee, Milton (Clydesdale), Miltonhead, Overshielhills Carmichael, 126 Carron Iron Works, 139 Cassini, César-François, de Thury, 30, 79, 92, 218–19

mémoire from, 206–9, 221–2, 230, 252, 272 Cassini, Jean-Dominique, 219, 235 Cassini survey see Carte de France Carte de France, 30, 79, 92–3, 95, 196, 219, 223–4, 236, 251, 255 Castlecary, Roman fort, 147, 152, 160 Castledykes, Roman fort, 52, 120, 125, 126, 127, 270 Castlehill, Roman fort, 139, 140 Castle O’er, hillfort, 122, 153 Caterthuns, Brown and White, hillforts, 153 Cavendish, Henry, 172, 181, 187, 207, 210, 251 Cawthorn, Roman fort and camps, 157 Channel, English, 223, 225, 235 Channelkirk, Roman camp, 131, 145, 148 Cherbourg, 70, 71 Chew Green, Roman fort and camps, 120, 151, 155, 161, 186, 272 Christie, James, 199, 250–1, 273 Clarke, John, 147 Cleghorn, Roman camp, 126, 144, 271 Clerk, John, of Eldin, 45, 127 Clerk, Sir John, of Penicuik, 45, 115, 127–8, 145, 148 Clerk, Matthew, 127–8 Clerk, Robert, 68 Clerk-Maxwell, George, 145, 147, 198 coastline, inspection, mapping and reports on, 28, 41, 48, 49, 50–1, 65, 81–2, 83, 84, 87, 89, 92, 94–6, 116, 204, 218, 220, 261, 270–1; see also ‘invasion coast’ Colby, Thomas, 254 Cole, Benjamin, instrument-maker, 35, 37 Colt Hoare, Sir Richard, 159, 258 Commissioners of Accounts, 102–3, 203–4, 272 Condamine, Charles-Marie de la, 175, 182 Conway, Henry Seymour, 89–90, 92–3 Cook, James, 171–3, 188, 194, 266 Copley Medal see Royal Society

298

general william roy, 1726–1790

county maps, 80, 93, 95, 195, 251–2, 255 court martial, 68, 72, 77, 271 Coxall Knoll, hillfort, 152 Coxheath, army camp, 101, 103, 106, 107, 108, 113, 189, 272 Crawford, O. G. S., 127, 156, 262 Culloden, battle of, 6, 22, 32–3, 34, 38, 47, 120 Cumberland, Duke of, 22, 27, 32, 45, 65, 68 Cumming, Alexander, 192 Dalby, Isaac, 237–8, 241, 248, 251, 253–4, 261, 267, 273 Dalginross, Roman fort and camp, 122, 123–4, 127, 156, 157, 158–9 Dalrymple, Alexander, 172, 232, 251 Dalzel, Andrew, 236 Danbury, army camp, 106, 108 Debbieg, Hugh, 40, 42, 112, 164, 196, 251 Deluc, Jean-André, 175–7, 180–1, 195, 267, 272 Desmaretz, John Peter, 89–90, 111 Dixon, Jeremiah, 183, 197, 205 Ducie, Baron, of Tortworth, 226–7, 259 Dundas, David, 32, 34, 40, 44, 47–8, 54, 56, 65–6, 74–5, 78, 109, 165, 239–40, 250, 259, 260 Dundas, Robert (d. 1753), 10, 26, 43 Dundas, Robert (‘Robie’ d. 1787), 10, 13, 16, 54 Dundas, William, 20, 40, 43, 65–6 Dunkirk, 86–7, 88, 89–92, 99–100, 195, 271 Durnford, Andrew, 89, 91, 100, 111 Earth, shape of, 94, 169, 182, 193, 204, 231–2 Earth, density of, 182, 184, 230 East India Company, 203, 232, 253 Edinburgh, 11–12, 15–16, 37, 39, 45, 52, 80–1, 181, 265 Edwards, James, 256 Eildon Hills (Trimontium), 148, 150, 271

Einbeck, 75, 76, 112, 271 Ellis, John, 180 Elphinstone, John, 25–6 Engineers, 14, 40, 64- 5, 89, 95 Corps of, 23, 108–9, 217–18 Erskine, Sir William, 113, 227 Eskdale, 53, 118 Faden, William, 251, 256 Falkirk, battle of, 26, 51, 139, 160 Farquhar, William, 227–8 Ferdinand, Prince, of Brunswick, 72, 74–5, 77, 89 Fiddes, James, 224, 235 Fordyce, Dr George, 174 France, cartography of, 30; see also Carte de France Fraser, Andrew, 89–91, 100, 111 Gardner, William, 202, 220 General Roy’s Instructions on Reconnoitring see Roy, William George II, 52 George III, 96, 155, 209, 216–18, 226, 230, 236, 238, 241–2, 253 Germany, 70–7, 143, 195–6, 204, 265, 271 Gibraltar, 44, 99, 189, 195, 224, 271 Glasgow, 6, 8, 12, 48, 58–9, 80, 198 Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, 262–3 Glenie, James, 104–5, 181, 208, 220 Glen Tilt, 183 Gordon, Alexander, 122, 123, 124, 127–8, 135–6, 141, 156, 159, 161 Itinerarium Septentrionale, 122, 136 Gordon, Sir William, 2, 10, 17, 58 Grassy Walls, Roman camp, 149, 271 Great Map, The, 56–8, 116 Fair Copy, 29, 39–40, 44, 58 specification, 27–32, 35, 54 see also Military Survey of Scotland Great Pulteney Street, London, 62, 81, 92, 97, 131, 168, 178, 180, 190, 271 Greenwich see Royal Observatory Greenwich-Paris project, 218, 224, 225,



Index 299

226, 230–1, 233, 236, 250, 254, 261, 272–3; see also Cassini Greville, Charles, 217 Grinnan Hill, promontory fort,153 Guernsey, 99, 128, 223, 272

209, 212, 215–16, 218, 233, 234, 236–7, 241, 248, 253–4, 266 ‘invasion coast’, 65, 82, 83, 84, 105, 204–5, 255, 265 Ireland, 15, 85, 99, 196, 271

Hadrian’s Wall, 123, 137 Hallcraig, Carluke, 2–3, 17, 101 Hallifax, John, 192 Hamilton, Gavin, 7, 246 Hamilton, Sir John, 2 Hamilton, Sir William, 217 Harrison, John, 170 Harrison, William, 170, 197 Havering Plain, army camp, 106 Hawkhill observatory, 180 Hayes, Catherine, 227–8, 246 Hayes, Mary, 226–8, 245–6 heights, determination of see hypsometry Herefordshire, 151, 153, 272 Herschel, William, 171, 193, 236 Hessian battalions, 65 Highlanders, Corps of, 74–5, 110, 271 Highlands of Scotland, 22–3, 26–7, 31, 38, 44, 50, 52, 55 hillforts and promontory forts, 117–18, 119, 120, 142, 143, 152–3, 166 Hornsby, Thomas, 224 Horsley, John, 115–16, 123–4, 127, 135–6, 141, 156, 158–9 Britannia Romana, 115–16, 123, 124, 125, 136, 150, 158 Horsley, Samuel, 172, 176, 208 Hounslow Heath, 210–12, 213–14, 215–17, 219, 221–3, 226, 230–1, 233, 252, 254, 256, 258, 260–1, 266, 272–3 Howes, Thomas, 40, 43, 61 Huang Ya Dong, 172 Hutton, Charles, 185, 208, 253 Hutton, James, 236 Hyginus, 147, 151 hypsometry, 174–81, 189, 207, 266–7, 272

Jacobites, 6, 15–16, 22, 26, 38, 41, 47, 52, 54, 59, 63, 270 Jenkinson, Charles, 190 Jersey, 99, 128, 189, 223, 272 Jews Harp, London, 205–6, 216, 266, 272

instruments, 59–60, 169, 177, 178–9, 180, 182, 184, 187, 192, 205, 207,

Kater, Henry, 254 Keith, Robert Murray, 74, 78, 97, 110 Keithock, Roman camp, 129, 130, 132 Kemp’s Walk, promontory fort, 49, 118 Kent, 66, 175, 196, 223, 252, 255–6, 270, 273 ‘King’s Road, The’, 52, 54, 55, 60 Kirkbuddo, Roman camp, 129, 130, 132 Kirkton, Carluke, 2, 3, 4, 264 Kyle of Tongue, 116, 160 Lanark, 59, 80, 126, 143, 180, 186, 188, 198, 272 Grammar School, 7–8, 11, 116, 121 Laurence, Edward, 3–4 Laurie, Richard, 256 Lee estate, Carluke, 2, 8, 18, 126 Legendre, Adrien-Marie, 235–6 Lempriere, Clement, 23, 24, 25–6, 31–2 Lennox, Charles see Richmond, Third Duke of Liddel Strength, motte-and-bailey castle, 53, 120, 153 Ligonier, General Sir John, 10, 26, 64, 70 Lind, James, 57, 167, 181, 183, 187, 224, 247 Lindley, Joseph, 222, 252–3 Lintrose, Roman camp, 130, 131–2 Lisbon, 239–41, 273 Livingstone, James, 228, 246, 250 Lloyd, John, 173–4, 190, 217

300

general william roy, 1726–1790

Lockhart, Capt. Walter, 4 Lockharts of Lee, 2, 8, 16, 165, 242 Long Acre, London, 227 Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, 66 Lowlands of Scotland, 47–52, 54, 56, 118 Macdonald, Sir George, 139 Mackenzie, Murdoch, 15, 25, 41, 57, 251 MacLaurin, Colin, 11–17, 30, 38, 115, 170, 235 McQueen, Robert see Braxfield Magalhães, João Jacinto (Magellan), 207 magazines and stores, 99, 101, 105, 272 Maiden Castle, hillfort, 142, 143, 270 Manson, John, 40, 44, 128 Mappa Britanniae Septentrionalis, 63, 154–5, 196, 272 Mark, George, 16, 123, 137, 164 Martello towers, 259 Maskelyne, Nevil, 94, 170, 172, 176, 180, 182–8, 190, 193, 208, 210, 221–2, 230–3, 250, 252 Mason, Charles, 183, 205 Maupertuis, Pierre, 182 Méchain, Pierre-Francois-André, 235–6, 250 Melville, Robert, 116, 127–31, 139, 145–6, 148, 152, 156, 159, 167, 169, 174, 190, 197, 267, 270 meridian, 14, 94–5, 169, 202, 205, 230–1, 254 Milford Haven, 65, 270 Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain, The, 117, 119, 126, 130, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 144, 146–7, 150–5, 157, 159, 161, 186, 192, 194, 196, 257–8, 272–3 Military Description of the South East Part of England, 82, 83, 84, 93, 109, 111, 261, 271 military intelligence, 28, 82, 85 Military Survey of Scotland, 3, 26–34, 35, 36–48, 49, 50–4, 55, 56–8, 65, 80, 93, 95, 98, 116, 118, 131–2,

143, 145, 154–5, 160–1, 174, 252, 256, 260, 264–5, 270 methods and instruments, 30, 35–6, 37, 39, 50–1, 94 personnel, 34–5, 40, 42–7 see also Great Map, The Milne, Thomas, 256 Milton (Annandale), 145 Milton (Clydesdale), 2, 3, 17, 101 Miltonhead, Carluke, 1, 3, 17, 262, 263 Minden, battle of, 10, 72, 73, 75, 77, 89, 161, 202, 271 Mons Graupius, battle of, 121–2 Mordaunt, Sir John, 68–9, 271 Moreton, Thomas Reynolds see Ducie Morton, Earl of, 14, 16, 38 mountains, attraction of, 182–5 Mudge, William, 254, 258, 273 Muir, Gavin, 4 Mulgrave, Lord see Phipps Münster, 74, 271 Mylne, Robert, 262 Napier, Col Robert, 64, 70, 165 national cartographic survey of Britain, 79, 92–6, 169, 175, 203, 205, 237–8, 253–5, 271 Netherby, 52, 53, 120, 122, 151 Nettlebed, 224, 226 Newton, Isaac, 12–14, 16, 182, 186 observatories, 184, 191, 192, 206–7, 224, 236; see also Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Royal Observatory, Paris Omai, 172 Ordnance Survey, 40, 95, 151, 160, 218, 220, 248, 256, 258, 262, 264, 267 Archaeology Branch, 258 see also Crawford, O. G. S., national cartographic survey of Britain Orr, Andrew, 6 Overshielhills, Carluke, 3, 18, 58, 63 Packe, Christopher, 175, 252 Palmerston, Lord, 261



Index 301

Pennymuir see Towford Pentland Hills, 180 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 181, 189, 194, 208, 212, 219, 236, 251, 272–3 Phipps, Constantine (Lord Mulgrave), 171–4, 180, 187–8, 190 Pitt, William, 68–9, 221 Playfair, John, 236 Pleydell, John Cleve, 40, 44, 46–7, 54, 86, 98–9 Plymouth, 105, 220–1, 273 Poland Street, London, 62, 227, 246 Polybius, 146 Pont, Timothy, 136 Portsmouth, 43, 66, 99, 220–1, 271, 273 Post Office, 9, 17, 19, 99 Prestonpans, 6, 97, 98, 260 Pringle, Sir John, 155, 165, 172, 188 Purdie, William, 200, 228 Raeburnfoot, Roman fort, 162 Ramsden, Jesse, 99, 176–7, 178, 184, 186–7, 189, 192, 209, 212, 215–17, 219, 223–4, 226, 230–1, 233, 234, 235, 237, 240–1, 253, 273 Rannoch, 35, 183 Regiments 1st Foot Guards, 47 2nd Irish Horse, 48 12th Foot, 46, 211 20th Foot, 228 25th Foot, 127 30th Foot, 227, 259, 267, 273 34th, 212, 226 36th Foot, 79 38th, 131 39th, 200, 228 51st, 10, 65, 72, 270 53rd, 64, 104, 270 Rennell, James, 195, 232 Reynolds, Thomas Matthew, 359–60 Reynolds, Thomas Vincent, 212, 213, 219, 225, 226–8, 234, 246, 250, 255, 258–60 Rhins of Galloway, 49

‘Richard of Cirencester’, 149–50, 155 Richmond, Third Duke of, 42, 89–90, 92–3, 96, 99, 202–3, 211, 217–18, 220–1, 223, 233, 253–5, 273 roads, 23, 30, 33, 38, 66, 67, 85, 270 Rochefort, 68–9, 193, 271 Roman antiquities, 52, 115, 120 camps, 119, 121–2, 123, 127–9, 130, 131, 145–7, 150, 156, 161, 270–1 castrametation, 144, 146–7, 151, 153, 156, 159, 161, 257 forts, 52, 118, 122, 123–4, 125, 126, 131, 136, 138, 156, 157 invasion, 82, 85–6 roads, 144, 148, 150 Scotland, 121–42, 154 Romney Marsh, 224, 235–6 Roy, Grizel, 4, 18, 270 Roy, James (b. 1730), 4, 7–8, 58–9, 80, 97, 98, 112–13, 260, 270–1 Roy, James (son of William’s cousin), 228 Roy, James (William’s uncle), 2, 18 Roy, John (d. 1728), 2 Roy, John (d. 1748), 2, 4–5, 8, 58, 101, 194, 264, 270 Roy, Mary, 4, 18, 59, 80, 186, 188, 194, 270, 272 Roy, Susanna (Susan), 4, 59, 186, 194, 226–7, 270, 272 Roy, William antiquities, innovative depiction of, 125, 126, 127, 132–3, 156, 157, 158–60 character, 85, 90, 99, 166, 173, 181, 189, 193, 230–1 Commissary General, 101–4, 189, 272 education, 6–8, 11, 116, 120 General Instructions for … Surveying, 56, 103–4, 217, 223 ‘General Roy’s Rule’, 261 ‘General Roy’s Scale’, 260–1 ill health, 92, 189–90, 224, 230–1, 235–6, 238–9, 251 Instructions on Reconnoitring, 51, 57, 103–4, 218, 260, 274–7

302

general william roy, 1726–1790

Roy, William (cont.) king, loyalty to the, xi, 6–7, 17, 168, 209, 236, 264; see also George III library, 11, 104, 156, 165, 169, 191, 193–6, 232, 247, 251, 273 politics, 193 portrait, 45, 228, 229 promotions and appointments, 64, 74, 78, 81, 100–1, 103, 188–9, 203, 217, 222, 270–3 Quartermaster, 72, 78–80, 86, 102 religion, 193–4 will, 159, 166, 227–8, 273 Royal Commissions on Ancient and Historical Monuments, 160, 258 Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, 31, 40, 42–3, 46–7, 64, 103, 224 Royal Observatory, Greenwich, 186–7, 205, 207, 252–3, 272 Board of Visitors, 186–7, 222, 248 Royal Observatory, Paris, 206 Royal Society, 12, 14, 104, 155–6, 169–74, 176, 180, 182, 186, 188–9, 206–10, 219, 222, 230, 240, 266, 271–2 Copley Medal, 185, 222, 273 dining clubs, 172–4, 188–90, 208, 232, 240, 272 Royal Society of Edinburgh, 13, 20, 236, 273 Sackville, Lord George, 16, 72, 77, 89, 271 St Malo, 69–70, 271 Saussure, Horace Bénédict de, 176 Sandby, Paul, 32–3, 35, 39–40, 43–4, 45, 46, 52, 55, 66, 81, 165, 174, 191, 229 Sandby, Thomas, 32, 45–6, 81, 192 Schiehallion, 155, 180, 182–3, 184, 185–6, 272 Scotland, national map of, 15, 47; see also Military Survey of Scotland Scots in London, 81, 168–9, 172, 227 Scott, Walter, 161, 258 Seven Years War, 66, 68–79, 86, 106, 132, 142, 204, 265, 270–1

Shooter’s Hill, 206, 224, 233, 238 Short, James, 11, 14, 16–17, 170, 192, 216 Short, Thomas, 192 Shuckburgh, Sir George, 174, 176–7, 181, 196, 208, 267 Sibbald, Sir Robert, 127, 161 Sinclair, Professor George, 175 Sisson, Jonathan, 180, 184, 192, 216, 260 Snowden, 181, 189 Society of Antiquaries [of London], 122, 149–50, 153–5, 159, 166, 195, 219, 257, 272 Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 155 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce [Society of Arts], 80, 95, 252 Solander, Daniel, 172, 180, 188 Stewart, John, 192 Stewart, Mary see Roy, Mary Stewart, Prince Charles Edward, 6, 15, 22, 270 Strathmore, 122, 127–33, 135, 156, 159 Stukeley, William, 115, 122, 149–50, 161, 271 Stuart, James ‘Athenian’, 188 Surrey, 252–3, 270 surveying, 4, 9–10, 14 Sussex, 202, 270 Sutherland, 162, 235 Tacitus, Cornelius, 120–1, 152 tactics, military, 66, 124–5 Tarrant, Charles, 40, 44, 46, 86 Taylor E. G. R., 11 Thonhausen see Minden Tibbers Castle, 153 Tinto, Clydesdale, 1, 175, 180, 186 Tiptree Heath, army camp, 106 Torwood, Roman camp, 145 Towford (Pennymuir), Roman camps, 155 Townshend, Viscount, 99 Treaty of Paris, 82, 86, 88, 131, 204–5, 271



Index 303

Treaty of Versailles, 204, 217 Trigonometrical Operation, 232, 238, 253–4, 256, 273 Trimontium see Eildon Hills Tower of London, Drawing Room, 31–2, 44, 64, 89, 103, 223 Ussher, Dr Henry, 217 Vallancey, Charles, 86 Vegetius, Publius Flavius, Renatus, 147 Visme, Gerard de, 239–40 Wade, General George, 22–3, 33, 38 Warley Common, army camp, 101, 103, 106, 108, 189, 272 Watson, Lieut Col David, 10–11, 16–17, 20, 26–7, 30–3, 39–40, 43, 47, 51–2, 54, 56, 58, 65–6, 77–8,

118, 132, 165, 218, 238, 257, 260, 271 Watson, William, 187 weights and measures, 216, 260–1 West Indies, 131 Westminster, Parish of St James, 242 White, Taylor, 170 Whitehaven, 228, 246 Willemstad, 79 Williams, Edward, 254, 256, 273 Williams, John, Engineer, 40, 42, 48 Williams, John, mining engineer, 61 Winchester, Palace of, 98–9 Windsor, 45, 224, 247 Woody Castle, lowland fort, 153, 166 Woolwich see Royal Military Academy Yeakell, Thomas, 202–3 Zierenberg, attack on, 75, 271